Even moderate poll ratings and the fact that the EU election was the worst result ever in a nationwide vote have not exactly increased confidence in the still relatively new party leader.
Andreas Babler is not being made easy by his party. The memorable vote counting error surrounding the party chairmanship and the Vienna allotment garden affair have barely been forgotten when the Linz Brucknerhaus scandal involving Mayor Klaus Luger comes out of nowhere and as if that wasn’t enough, Doris Bures (SPÖ), the party’s political heavyweight, also tears up the draft election manifesto. If the election goes wrong, Babler would at least have a few good excuses at hand.
Chancellor’s Party
The SPÖ sees itself as a government party, actually even a chancellor’s party. This has a lot to do with the Bruno Kreisky era, which continued through Fred Sinowatz, Franz Vranitzky and Viktor Klima and made anything other than a red head of government seem unthinkable for an entire generation.
The turning point came at the turn of the millennium, when Wolfgang Schüssel dared to break the taboo of a black-blue coalition. Since then, it is no longer the SPÖ that seems to be stuck in government, but the People’s Party that keeps its doors open in all directions.
Actually, from that point on, things weren’t going as well for the Social Democrats as they had before, when they could still afford all sorts of scandals from Lucona to Noricum and still not be pushed out of power. At least they did manage to regain the chancellery for a while, where Werner Faymann, who was always a little underestimated, was able to steer Austria through the financial crisis quite successfully in retrospect.
Historical fall from grace
But it is precisely the case of Werner Faymann that continues to haunt the SPÖ to this day. The chorus of whistles against the then Chancellor and party leader on May 1, 2016 is considered by many parts of the party to be a historic sin. This wound has not healed to this day, but various personal injuries have since been added to it.
There have always been camps in the SPÖ, but at crucial moments they pulled themselves together so that the success of the whole was not endangered. Nowadays there is hardly anyone in top positions who puts the party’s well-being above that of their own wing or themselves. The upright Carinthian governor Peter Kaiser sometimes seemed almost like Don Quixote when he tried to bring the party’s various interest groups to their senses.
In terms of content, the SPÖ is no longer divided by so much. The draft of the current election manifesto hardly differs from that of the People’s Party in terms of asylum policy, which for years served as a friction point between left and right within the party. In social policy, the party thinks similarly across the board anyway, and the few differences are primarily emphasized in order to distinguish themselves from the other wings. From today’s perspective, the tough party conference between Hans Peter Doskozil and Andreas Babler, which was overshadowed by the embarrassing counting error, no longer really seems like a substantive decision on direction.
No real authority
The fact that there are still constant clashes is also due to the fact that there has been no real authority in the party for a long time. The Vienna SPÖ, together with the trade union, was considered the pacesetter of the federal party until the states finally had enough and decided to push through a party leader in the form of Christian Kern against the will of the large power bloc. Even though Pamela Rendi-Wagner was later practically adopted and Babler was reluctantly supported against Doskozil, no party leader since Faymann has come from the capital’s Reds circle.
In addition, neither Vienna’s mayor Michael Ludwig, who concentrates his fine power techniques on the federal capital, nor the trade unionists have built up logical party leaders. The same could be said about Kaiser, and Doskozil ultimately polarized for too long to find a broad base, even if he potentially had a good chance of success with voters.
Babler lacks support from sub-organizations
So Babler, the mayor of a small town, came into the picture. Until then, he had attracted attention in national politics primarily with his heckling from Traiskirchen. The successful mayor has parts of the grassroots behind him with his populist left-wing course, which can never hurt, but he lacks any support from the influential sub-organizations. If one or two state parties can be described as loyal to him, that is already a lot. Much more often, the “Babler sect” is mockingly referred to to describe the rather small circle around the chairman.
Babler’s first and probably only chance is to achieve a victory against all expectations in the upcoming national election or at least to bring the SPÖ into government and from there to gain a stronger standing. Otherwise, the Social Democrats will probably continue to quarrel and will only be able to shape things in their strongholds in the long term. In Vienna and Burgenland, where elections will be held next year, first place seems well secured. In Carinthia, they also have the governor’s seat and the mayor’s office not only in Vienna but also in St. Pölten and Salzburg. It is anything but certain whether this will continue to be the case in Linz after the Luger scandal and new elections.