He plans to announce details at a press conference on Wednesday. After the election, Fußi had already made critical comments about the performance of the current party leader Andreas Babler. The SPÖ grants Fußi the right to potentially run for office. Before a direct election, he must first collect enough declarations of support.
“Renew from the ground up”
“I’m not running against anyone, I’m running for the presidency of the SPÖ in order to renew it from the ground up,” wrote Fußi in the announcement of his planned personal statement. Fußi had already flirted with running for office in the race for party leadership last year. For the vote he became a member of the SPÖ again. It was Fußi’s right to demand a direct election as a member, the SPÖ said in a statement.
In order for there to be an election at all, Fußi would have to receive support from at least ten percent of the SPÖ members from at least four federal states within a quarter, with no federal state being allowed to receive more than a third of the votes. The purpose of this hurdle is to distinguish serious applications from purely fun candidacies. The SPÖ decided on the rules at the last federal party conference as part of a “democratization process”.
Federal party sees “PR coup”
In the federal party there was talk of a “PR coup” by Fußi. His many party political positions, ranging from the ÖVP to the Liberal Forum to the Stronach team, are known. The PR consultant is considered a confidant of the former party leader and Chancellor Christian Kern. He recently called for changes in his party on the ORF program “Im Zentrum”, but ruled out his participation in a future government as “absurd”.
The rumors that Fußi could get involved in a new presidential debate were fueled by the website, which features a countdown to the press conference and the slogan “New Reds … needs the country.” On election day, Fußi wrote on the social network
SPÖ Burgenland “knows nothing”
The SPÖ had actually already completed the restart last year. After internal dissatisfaction with then-chairwoman Pamela Rendi-Wagner, the party underwent a vote marked by glitches, from which Babler ultimately emerged as his successor. The opposing candidate at the time was the Burgenland governor Hans Peter Doskozil.
In any case, the SPÖ Burgenland had nothing to do with Fussi’s announcement, said club chairman Roland Fürst at a press conference: “We’re not there. We don’t know anything.” Fürst didn’t want to comment further on this, just this much: “I wouldn’t say that there is a new chairman debate just because someone announced that they wanted to run.”
Tyrol’s SPÖ boss, deputy governor Georg Dornauer, did not want to comment on the matter when asked at a press conference on Tuesday. He was allowed to do this “in the interest of social democracy.”
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