“Gemma hoit a bisserl unter,” said the cabarettist Jura Soyfer. It’s thick Austrian dialect, but you might translate it as “let’s go under just a little bit”.
Soyfer’s family were refugees from the Russian Revolution of 1917. Their son would go on to become one of the most biting satirists of interwar Vienna’s dyspeptic political scene.
Soyfer would have found much comic material to mine in Austria’s current political situation. As Europe is convulsed with the fallout of Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine — from which Austria is very far from being immune — Vienna’s politicking is reverting to type.
The sweeping symphonic crises that marked the past two years under the chancellorship of Sebastian Kurz are fading, replaced with a more temperate but no less vicious cycle of chamber melodramas: just a little bit of corruption and bitter factionalism as Europe teeters on the brink.
As Thomas Hofer, an Austrian journalist turned political commentator, put it as we caught up over coffee early one morning in Vienna’s hipsterish — Bobo — seventh district last month, “everything in Austrian politics becomes an operetta”.
Readers in the UK may recognise the tendency, with Westminster gripped over who attended a party or drank a beer during lockdown two years ago, rather than talking about recession and war.
But Austrian scandals have their own particular quality, often several degrees more labyrinthine than elsewhere. Trivial things rapidly snowball as cover-ups are attempted. Often, headline-hungry prosecutors stumble upon entirely new conspiracies. Inevitably, the prosecutors are then themselves found to have broken the law.
We are now five months into the chancellorship of Karl Nehammer. Bluff and assertive — much is made of his brief time working for the army — Nehammer, it had been assumed, would readjust Austria’s governing conservative People’s party and bring some stability to the political scene.
An interview in February did not portend well. It was given from the passenger seat of his car, to Austria’s biggest tabloid, as he was driven home from holiday by his wife. Unscripted and unprepared, he had apparently decided to do it on a whim. Perhaps the intention had been to set a different tone to Kurz, who surrounded himself with spin-doctors. Vienna’s chattering classes tended to see it as cringeworthy, if not reckless.
In March, Katharina Nehammer found herself in the headlines again. A bodyguard from the chancellor’s Cobra close protection squad crashed his car en route home. He had, it turned out, been drinking rather too much with the chancellor’s wife, Katharina. An anonymous letter from an insider leaked to the media suggested some kind of cover-up had taken place. Now state prosecutors are involved.
Last month there was Nehammer’s well-meaning but ill-judged trip to visit Vladimir Putin. Again, he seemed to have been the recipient of terrible advice. Some politicos questioned whether Katharina had played a role advising on the trip. Others say the trip was the fault of Kai Diekmann, former editor of the German tabloid Bild, who has the ear of the chancellor. (Diekmann was only recently quoted in the Ostsee Zeitung of Rostock, boasting of his special relationship with Putin and of having once been lent some swim shorts by the warmongering Chekist.)
Then there are the corruption cases. Since Kurz was ensnared in an investigation into whether his allies had used state funds to buy friendly coverage in newspapers, under the pretext of advertising, a whole series of linked investigations have proliferated. There are too many to properly recount.
In the province of Vorarlberg, for example, prosecutors are investigating whether People’s party officials systematically misdirected hundreds of thousands of euros of government money to garner positive media treatment. A separate probe is looking at whether the party’s economic association evaded nearly €1mn in taxes.
Even Austria’s Green party, the junior coalition partner propping up the Nehammer government, are not immune. There are rumblings of an upcoming Ministeranklage — a vote in parliament to charge a minister with breaking the law — against the Greens’ Leonore Gewessler, the “superminister” responsible for the environment, energy and transport, over an alleged conspiracy to quash the huge Lobau Tunnel infrastructure project. Gewessler has denied unduly interfering in the process.
Against all of this, a powerful parliamentary committee, with wide-ranging rights of subpoena, is continuing its work. The U-Ausschuss has been given a mandate to look into corruption by the People’s party — more or less wherever it scents it. “It’s too much!” exclaimed a committee member over a lunch of Backhendl. They are drowning in conspiracies.
Individually, of course, none of these microscandals or rococo court intrigues seems especially significant. But altogether, their sheer volume seems to say something damning about Austria’s polity: scratch the surface almost anywhere in the country, at any level of the government, and there’s something awry.
