2023-05-26 17:29:25
There will be no direct duel before the party conference on Saturday next week, but in newspaper interviews the SPÖ presidency candidates have now aligned all sorts of unfriendliness. The Mayor of Traiskirchen, Andreas Babler, accuses the Burgenland governor, Hans Peter Doskozil, of listening to polls and being fickle, the latter accusing the former of wanting to abolish the federal army, among other things.
Doskozil gave interviews for “Presse”, “Standard” and “Kleine Zeitung” and questioned the party line on reducing working hours, which Babler also vehemently advocated. He sees a labor shortage as a result and that people might not do much in their free time due to a lack of additional income.
Babler, on the other hand, emphasizes in the “Standard” that he is “fixer” than Doskozil on classic social democratic issues. The mayor, for example, rejects the hiring of caring relatives in Burgenland, which would force women to give up their existence. In terms of asylum, he criticizes the position paper drawn up by Doskozil and Carinthia’s governor Peter Kaiser as “superficial” and wants to have a new one drawn up.
Doskozil criticizes Babler’s announcement that he is a Marxist: “That puts me off.” He is applying as a Social Democrat for the presidency of the Social Democratic Party, according to the governor.
In the interviews, both contenders for the presidency also directly target important support groups of the incumbent Pamela Rendi-Wagner, who was eliminated from the three-way battle. Babler finds their dismantling “scandalous”: “The way the dispute was conducted is also an attack on the women in the SPÖ.”
Doskozil, on the other hand, is sending signals to the union, whose top staff has long grumbled because the state governor would also welcome a statutory minimum wage of 2,000 euros. Now Doskozil says he will go hand in hand with the union on this matter. It is even an advantage for them if the Chamber of Commerce, as a negotiating partner, knows that there may also be a risk of a statutory minimum wage.
With the expansion of inner-party democracy, Doskozil would pick up the pace. As early as next year’s regular party congress, he wants to stipulate that not only the party chairmanship will be determined by the grassroots, but that any government program must also be confirmed. This should already be possible when the next coalition is formed.
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