The Vienna election does not take place in the fall, but already on April 27, yet the issue of budget woes has already become alarmingly prominent for the SPÖ of Mayor Michael Ludwig. Statistics Austria has just announced that the national deficit last year was much higher than already feared.
In Vienna itself, one might have originally expected even worse figures; however, the over one and a half billion euros of new debt for the city is exorbitant: It corresponds roughly to the total amount reported for all other Austrian municipalities as well as the federal states of Lower Austria and Burgenland.
Worse: This year, the city expects a deficit of up to 3.8 billion euros. This is – for the municipal level – an almost unbelievable level. And it will lead to painful cuts becoming inevitable after the election.
All the more remarkable is that the question of political responsibility for this mess is so neglected. It is clear: Part of the blame lies with former Finance City Councillor Peter Hanke (SPÖ). However, he does not have to face any consequences. At the request of Ludwig and with the approval of SPÖ federal party leader, Vice Chancellor Andreas Babler, he has, in a way, been rewarded and was made Minister of Transport a few weeks ago.
Budgetary failure is quite obviously irrelevant at all levels in Austria. Citizens will have their services cut afterwards. But otherwise? At the federal level, former Chancellor Karl Nehammer, together with former Finance Minister Magnus Brunner, claimed until the national election in September that there would be no austerity package; that an economic upswing would make such a package unnecessary. Today we know: They misled the people about the true situation, to put it mildly. And instead of a boom, a recession is still ongoing.
The former Chancellor and his then Finance Minister were still rewarded: Karl Nehammer has been nominated by the current Finance Minister Markus Marterbauer (SPÖ) for a director position at the European Investment Bank, and Brunner is already an EU Commissioner.
FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl says thank you: He may personally be in a crisis because he deprived himself of the chancellorship. However, it is quite possible that he will get a second chance sooner or later. Work is being done on this: It fits his narrative that elites have lost all sense of what is acceptable and what is not; that they arrange things for themselves but impose austerity packages on the people.
ÖVP and SPÖ should not be surprised if Kickl is even further ahead with his party in the next national election or if they fall even further behind.
Johannes Huber runs the blog dieSubstanz.at – Analyses and Backgrounds on Politics
This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.