Sebastian Kurz fails because of his contradictions

Kurz is the most talented and charismatic politician in Austria. The Viennese are smart and eloquent, they know how to talk to people, look after their friends and involve skeptics. The Byzantine-looking ÖVP, which the political scientist Peter Filzmaier described as the “square root of governors divided by the views of the leagues”, brought the young politician completely on his line – so much that it depends entirely on his success. The fact that she dropped him at the weekend shows how deep the shock is over the recent affairs.

In a personal conversation, Kurz can be the personified charm. He received those media that he did not count among his opponents for a casual background discussion in the Chancellery, and he called journalists for an interview on Sunday evening. However, he can react thin-skinned, almost allergic, to critical questions, especially if he locates them in the left-liberal Viennese milieu. His need for harmony coexists with a pronounced friend-foe thinking.

Kurz has been characterized by strong camp thinking since the beginning of his political career. He turned the youth organization of the ÖVP into an efficient cadre forge before he became State Secretary at the age of 24. In 2013 he took over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where the college dropout rose to become the most important bearer of hope for Austria’s conservatives.

During the refugee crisis in 2015, Kurz dwarfed the rest of the then grand coalition between Social Democrats and ÖVP with his hard line. Kurz and his circle recognized that the soaring of the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) could only be stopped by partially assuming its migration policy positions. The “closure” of the Balkan route in the following spring turned out to be his greatest success – even if this was largely dependent on the EU-Turkey pact negotiated at the same time.

Ruthless power instinct

In May 2017 he became party leader of the Conservatives, and five months later the “List Sebastian Kurz – the new people’s party” clearly won the early National Council election. The fact that the party was tailored to his person was only a sign of a pronounced sense of power.

Kurz never made a secret of the fact that he hated the consensus culture ritualized in the decades-long coalition in Austria. With some right, he saw in this the root of an increasing inability to reform and a petrifaction of the country. Kurz not only brought the coalition with the SPÖ to an early end, but also removed, with his predecessor Reinhold Mitterlehner, the representatives of an overly moderate course from the party leadership. He called this an “ass” in cell phone messages that have now become public.

How purposeful and ruthless the new leadership was only became known over time. The left-wing weekly “Falter” revealed the “Project Ballhausplatz”, a detailed strategy for taking power. The chats that have become public in the last few days complete the unflattering picture: The foreign minister’s allies presumably used taxpayers’ money to buy not only short-friendly campaigns in the tabloid “Austria”, but also manipulated surveys. The public prosecutor’s office accuses him and various confidants of corruption, bribery and infidelity.

Bizarrely, the polls only confirmed the politician’s apparent popularity. However, Kurz also actively worked behind the scenes to present himself as having no alternative to a seemingly completely paralyzed coalition. His confidante Thomas Schmid informed him about negotiations of the coalition leaders to support popular all-day schools and childcare with additional funds. “Not good at all!!! How can you stop that? “, Kurz asked back and added:” Can I instigate a federal state? “After all, the program only came in a scaled-down form.

The shift to the right that the ÖVP carried out under Kurz was not much controversial within the party due to its radiance – also because the chairman cleverly avoided breaking with important interest groups. The coalition with the FPÖ, which the new Chancellor entered into on December 15, 2017, was hated in the left and liberal spectrum. But they also saw business-related groups in the ÖVP as an opportunity to carry out structural reforms. The two parties found their similarities in migration, but also in tax cuts and family policy.

By positioning himself as a guarantor of a pro-European stance, Kurz avoided those conflicts with Brussels that Austria had introduced sanctions when the Freedom Party first took part in government in 2000. On the other hand, there was skepticism that Herbert Kickl, an extremely unpredictable politician, took over the Ministry of the Interior. The raid on the BVT intelligence service caused a lasting loss of trust among foreign partners. The FPÖ was also never able to convincingly distance itself from its right-wing extremist fringe.

Nevertheless, the end of the coalition, which was always striving for harmony, came on May 17, 2019 like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. The publication of the Ibiza video, in which Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache let his media control thirsts run free and talked about illegal donation schemes, forced Kurz to break. His attempt to continue with an ÖVP sole government resulted in his being voted out of office by a parliamentary vote of no confidence.

At the next poll he used the opportunity to profile himself as a victim of opposition machinations and to return to power strengthened: The ÖVP won 37.5 percent of the votes. This gave her the opportunity to form a government with the newly strengthened Greens – a stroke of luck, also because relations with social democrats and liberals were broken.

Conservative green pioneers

The now 33-year-old reinvented himself and presented himself as a European pioneer of conservative-green cooperation. He whitewashed the inherent contradictions between a right-wing bourgeois party and an emphatically left-wing party with his communicative talent. The coalition will combine “the best of both worlds”, repeated the Chancellor and his Green Deputy Werner Kogler like a mantelpiece: tough migration policy and strengthening the location for the ÖVP and ecological reforms for the junior partner.

That the tensions had not disappeared was shown again and again with irritating topics such as deportations or road construction. The fact that they did not escalate was due to the corona pandemic, which made political differences disappear behind the fight against the crisis.

What Kurz really stood for politically became even more blurred: in the last 18 months he appeared as a pragmatist of power who did not want to leave any political flanks open and for this also let the state coffers open widely. The “eco-social tax reform” presented at the beginning of October was an example of this Kurz’s realpolitik: although it showed a cautious green signature, it was cushioned by concessions to all important interest groups, from farmers to industry to families and motorists. Coherence looks different.

The haste with which Kurz presented many of his projects was always linked to the aim of banning unpleasant topics from the public. Like a sword of Damocles, “Ibiza” hung over the conservative-green government: Although the government had tried to prevent a broad investigation committee, it had to accept it after an intervention by the constitutional court.

The ÖVP could not prevent the surveys from concentrating more and more on their political deals instead of those of the FPÖ. Post chatters and counter-deals, which had been an integral part of Austrian politics for decades, suddenly received a degree of public attention that caught those involved on the wrong foot and entangled Kurz in contradictions. The claim that he knew nothing about anything was implausible for the power-conscious politician.

For Sebastian Kurz, it must be a bitter irony that it was Thomas Schmid’s manic need to communicate that ultimately became his undoing. As a powerful general secretary in the finance ministry, this man had once given the young politician access to the money pots and the media to influence his career. Now the public prosecutor had confiscated Schmid’s mobile phone as part of their investigations into the post cheat under the ÖVP-FPÖ government – and thus access to over 300,000 text messages from his inner circle.

Not a new style

The politicized and quarreling criminal prosecutors did not always cut a confident figure. The constant leaks to the media by those involved in the proceedings and the fact that the chats, which are ultimately fatal for Kurz, are actually only bycatch, temporarily reduced the presumption of innocence to absurdity. But the tone, the contempt for opponents and the drunkenness that emerges from them are the opposite of the “new style” that Kurz promised. For this reason, too, his line of defense did not convince that similar practices had prevailed under previous governments.

The fact that the Chancellor behaved anything but statesmanlike in his desperate defensive struggle and caused considerable damage to the fields with his often undifferentiated attacks on the judiciary ultimately made him intolerable.

Until recently, Kurz was incapable of self-criticism. Even at the moment of his resignation, which he justified on grounds of state, he could not hide his bitterness over the betrayal of the Greens and the “unjust” treatment that had befallen him. Kurz hopes to return to the top once the allegations have been dispelled. The question of which partners will remain with him one day remains as open as the role that he will play in the near future for the stability of the Austrian system.

More: Kurz paved the way for the government of the Greens and ÖVP to continue. He rejects the corruption allegations against him as false.