Austria - 2006 Election National Council
Austria is a parliamentary democracy with constitutional power shared between the popularly elected president and the bicameral Federal Assembly (parliament). The country's eight million citizens choose their government representatives in periodic, free, and fair multiparty elections.Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control of the security forces. In 2004 voters elected President Heinz Fischer of the SPO to a six-year term in national elections in which individuals could freely declare their candidacy and stand for election. In 2002 the OVP received a plurality in parliamentary elections and renewed its right-center coalition with the Freedom Party (FPO).
The Freedom Party (FPO) executive board decided on 07 March 2005 to strip prominent right-wingers of party offices. In a reaction to severe losses in local elections in the state of Lower Austria, the leadership also tasked a six-person reform committee with "renewing" the party. Just hours after the meeting, Carinthian Governor Haider repeated his proposal to found a new FPO at a special convention to take place in late spring. The purging of the FPO's far-right faction represents a temporary victory for the pro-coalition party leadership under party chair Haubner and Vice- Chancellor Gorbach. However, if the string of FPO losses in state elections continues later this year, the outlook is for continued volatility and further friction with Chancellor Schuessel's People's Party (OVP). The Alliance for the Future of Austria broke away from the FPO, but remained a junior partner with the OVP in the coalition government.
The Federal Assembly consists of the National Council and the Federal Council. There were 58 women in the 183-seat National Council and 18 women in the 62-member Federal Council. There were five women in the 14-member Council of Ministers (cabinet). Although there appeared to be relatively little minority representation at the national level, no precise information on the number of minorities in the Federal Assembly was available. Some Muslims were on party lists for the elections but were not elected into the Federal Assembly.
Austria's 01 October 2006 elections took place in the context of a political shift that followed this year's revelations of fraud in the trade union-affiliated bank, BAWAG. This established a new political reality in which Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel's conservative People's Party (OVP) has consistently polled ahead of the Social Democratic Party (SPO) by two to four percentage points. This shift, combined with Schuessel's personal popularity, puts the OVP in the driver's seat to lead the next Austrian government. The campaign so far has been rather formulaic, with the OVP appealing to trust in Schuessel, and the SPO making vague calls for greater "fairness." The political theater has come from the xenophobic leader of the Freedom Party (FPO) -- not Joerg Haider, who left the FPO to form his own party and then fade as a political force, but rather Heinz-Christian Strache.
The uncertainty surrounding this campaign was less one of vote numbers than of post-election coalition negotiations. Even OVP loyalists discounted the possibility of the OVP winning an absolute majority. One key question is whether the OVP will have options beyond forming a Grand Coalition with the SPO. The other is whether the SPO and Greens would together garner enough seats to form a government, thereby depriving Schuessel of the Chancellorship even if the OVP comes in first. Even if Schuessel remained Chancellor, the next coalition government could well include a non-OVP Foreign Minister. Foreign policy would likely be subject to even stricter constraints in a coalition agreement between the OVP and a left-leaning party. That said, policy change would come only incrementally.
With less than two weeks to go before Austria's national parliamentary elections on October 1, the big news seems to be the lack of news. If it seemed that the major campaign themes were the same as they would have been six months ago, that is because the defining event of this campaign season occurred six months earlier. That was when it became public that the Austrian Trade Union Federation (OGB) bank, the "Bank fuer Arbeit und Wirtschaft A.G." (BAWAG), had involved itself in massive fraud. What is more, the OGB bailed out BAWAG with funds from its workers' strike fund.
Although the OGB and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) are separate entities, the relationship between the two had been almost organic. SPO party leader Alfred Gusenbauer did what he could to stop the bleeding. Among other things, he declared that the SPO would no longer grant slots on its parliamentary election list to union officials. Naturally, this carried its own backlash. Union workers, who had traditionally undertaken a significant share of the SPO's electioneering work, were not amused.
Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's Austrian People's Party (OVP) suffered a stinging defeat at the polls on October 1. Contrary to every pollster's and analyst's expectations, Schuessel's party plummeted 8 points to second place. After having held a clear and commanding lead in opinion polls throughout the campaign, Schuessel's conservative Austrian People's Party (OVP) fell far below the level even his opponents had hoped to see. From predictions (ref b, for example) of a 38-40 percent showing, support for the OVP dropped to just 34.2 percent in the only poll that counts - the election. The opposition Social Democratic Party (SPO) also actually did worse than in the last elections, ending up on the low end of pundits' predictions. But what matters is that the SPO is the strongest party, and will have the first shot at forming the next government and thereby claiming the Chancellorship.
Apart from the OVP's tumble, the biggest and most significant surprise came from the "Alliance-Future-Austria" (BZO). Joerg Haider's "chip off the FPO" appears to have barely crossed the four percent threshhold necessary to enter parliament. The protest party of SPO renegade Hans-Peter Martin faded, taking only 2.8 percent and falling short of a parliamentary mandate. The FPO and BZO together received almost 15 percent of the vote in the October 1 election. This is a good -- but not spectacular -- result for a portion of the political spectrum that reached a high-water mark of 27 percent in the 1999 election. Fears that immigration will cost Austrians jobs or will change Austrian culture, concerns about law and order, and the personal popularity of party leaders probably account for most of the two parties' support. More extreme views, however, undoubtedly motivate some FPO/BZO voters.
While the SPO's strength dropped by a seat to 68, the OVP dropped 13 seats. If these circumstances held through the final tally, with the magic number for a majority at 92, the only possibility of a two-party coalition would be a Grand Coalition. In 2006, the voter participation figure was ten points lower than it was in 2002, and, at 74.2 percent of registered voters, was the lowest since the formation of the Second Republic in 1955. Election-day polls indicated that this may have hurt the OVP disproportionately. A large part of the number of those who stayed at home consisted of OVP sympathizers.
The new Austrian parliament met for the first time on October 30. As is traditional, the parliament voted members of the top three parties -- the Social Democratic Party (SPO), the People's Party (OVP) and the Greens -- to the three parliamentary leadership positions. Of considerably more interest was the decision of the SPO, Greens and the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) to vote for a parliamentary commission of enquiry into the Schuessel government's 2002 decision to purchase Eurofighters.
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