My analysis of the Austrian Presidential election of 2016

The historic 2016 Presidential election of Austria finally concluded yesterday, with the Green Party's Alexander van der Bellen the eventual winner in the second round over the Freedom Party's Norbert Hofer, and eventually by a margin of only 0.6%.

With this result, Alexander becomes the first ever Green President of Austria, and only the second President of Austria not endorsed by the social-democratic Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) or the conservative Austrian People's Party (OVP) elected since 1945.

As a Green, I am particularly pleased with Alexander's win and it shows that green politics and values can win elections nationally as well as locally or regionally. As a political analyst, this election represents the start of a sea of political change in Austria, a nation whose vote on most elections since the end of World War II has resulted in the SPO or OVP, or both, forming the government of Austria, with the notorious exceptions of 1999 and 2002 when an OVP-FPO government took office, resulting in sanctions from the European Union being applied temporarily to Austria during the first term of the OVP-FPO coalition. The SPO and OVP currently hold just 99 seats out of 183 between them, and the next legislative elections in Austria will, on current opinion polling, likely result in less than half of the seats in the National Council being shared by the SPO and OVP for the very first time. In this election, the SPO's Presidential candidate, Rudolf Hunsdorter, and the OVP's Presidential candidate, Andreas Khol, finished fourth and fifth respectively, and between them they polled just 22.4% of the votes cast, not much more than former Supreme Court Justice Irmgard Griss, who by achieving 18.9% was the best performer out of candidates who did not qualify for the second round. Neither Rudolf nor Andreas even came close to qualifying for the nail-biting second round; meanwhile, it was independent candidate Richard Lugner who came last.

Certainly, elections like this one show that it is hope, not fear, that will allow us all to find a new (and hopefully green) way and break the tired old bonds of neoliberalism.

Alan.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The English local elections of 2023-Conservatives pay the penalty for failing to put a stop to sleaze and sewage in our rivers

The English local elections of 2023 (Northern Ireland's elections will finish next week and a separate blog post will be devoted to these) not only resulted in more than 1000 Conservative losses just as Rallings & Thrasher and Sir John Curtice predicted, they also resulted in sweeping Green and Liberal Democrat gains across the nation-sending a hard message to the Conservatives about the need to protect our environment and Labour for barely acting like an opposition at all. The Conservatives in total made a net loss of 1,061 seats, with the vast majority being in the shire districts where they once dominated-even councils such as Bracknell Forest and Surrey Heath, which they held in 1995 and 2019, fell, to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively in those two cases. Who they lost to varied widely by the nature of the authority-their losses to Labour came mainly in (ex) industrial "Red Wall" areas where they had made against-the-trend gains in 2019 or fared better
Read more

My analysis of the Swedish general election of 2022

The Swedish general election of 2022 generated some surprising results, despite also averting pollsters' predictions significantly. The last three years in particular proved to be a rough ride for the Social Democrat led governments of Stefan Lofven and Magdalena Andersson respectively. Although Sweden's laxer approach to the COVID-19 pandemic (compared to most countries in Europe, which imposed lockdowns during much of 2020 and 2021, an approach that arguably caused more problems than it solved) proved effective, Mr Lofven's desire to lift the austerity tax (which only affected a wealthy minority, similar in nature to the wealth tax initiative of former French President Francois Hollande) and to join NATO proved contentious, with two of the Social Democrats' former coalition partners (the Swedish Greens and Swedish Left Party, who had both pulled out of confidence and supply) unsurprisingly voting against Swedish accession to NATO membership (all other parties in the R
Read more

On the 2020 Serbian election: Why a boycott will only worsen things there

First of all, I apologise for the recent hiatus; however elections are still postponed or on hold in many countries, including the UK. Serbia, however, was able to proceed with its 2020 general election amidst this crisis. Its overall result proved reminiscent of Hungarian elections under Viktor Orban's tenure (2010-present), since the leading national-conservative coalition, the SNS (Progressive Party of Serbia) coalition led by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic (Ana Brnabic is the Serbian Prime Minister, and the first woman and openly homosexual person to hold that position), polled 61.6% of the vote, giving them as many as 191 seats out of 250 and a majority of as high as 132, almost unheard of in any country with proportional representation. Press freedom has endured significant curbs since President Vucic first came into power as Serbian PM in 2012 (he became President of Serbia in 2017), as have civil liberties of Serbs in general. Nepotism and corruption in the Serbian
Read more