„In Berlin,“ wrote the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus sometime before last call in the First World War, „they say the situation is serious, but not hopeless; in Vienna, they say the situation is hopeless, but not serious.“ As with many jokes, a considerable portion of the humour here lies in the ability to reproduce the speakers’ accents, and this invariably fails to translate when retold in a different language. The one, universal exception to this is the Scotchman’s brogue: the fact that the coked-out Sandy whose toes I stepped on one night at the Munich Oktoberfest bafflingly chose German as the language in which to accuse me (quite unjustly, as it were) of calling his kilt a blanket did nothing to dampen the levity of his declamations. But, here, as in the first example, the use of exaggerated local diction is not itself what makes the joke, but is rather used to focus attention on some eccentricity of the national character: in the Scotsman’s case, intoxicated belligerence, and in Kraus’ witticism, the Austrian’s natural coolness under fire steaming up from a molten core of blithe cynicism.
For the situation in Vienna has once again reached the point that would, anywhere else, be considered serious. The eternal Scotchman (not the one I met in Munich) is aboot again in Austria’s hallowed glens. Strange games are afoot the like o' whilk ye dae nae ken.
Let us examine the events of the past month and half. The general circumstances regarding the Austrian election should be sufficiently known to J’accuse’s enlightened, cosmopolitan readership as to require no reiteration, although details can be found in this article.
On December 17th, Donald Trump names North Carolina realtor Arthur Graham Fisher as his prospective ambassador to Austria. Fisher, a relatively obscure political donor with no prior connection to the country, marked a departure from Trump’s previous ambassador, the ‚slightly dark‘ Trevor Traina, a „tech entrepreneur“ who began his career with the Bronfman family firm Seagram. Traina, who knew exactly which buttons to push to assure his hosts of the Administration’s goodwill, brought with him to the Alpine Republic a modest investment in Wirecard, the mischievous fintech firm whose connections to Vienna’s more exalted spheres have been described in this paper. This opened doors into the shadier parts of Kurzworld, and Traina, Wirecard CEO Markus Braun, and Kurz apparently boozed together on a regular basis at centre-right comms wizard Wolfgang Rosam’s castle — a degree of access to the local head of government that most US ambassadors would envy. From the prince of the fintech dark arts to backwoods realtor: quite a fall in Austria’s international prestige indeed.
On January 3rd, the NEOS, the pseudo-classical liberal party (for British readers, their ideology approximates that of the Adam Smith Institute), breaks off coalition negotiations with the ÖVP and SPÖ, leaving the latter pair to continue haggling over a potential one-seat majority in the lower chamber of parliament. The reasoning given by the party and its 5/10 zoomer girl leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger is not necessary to recount: the NEOS’ function in Austria’s political system is to act as the Lower Austrian Raiffeisen complex’s equivalent of the bloc parties in the Soviet satellite states; that is, as a front organisation designed to split the ÖVP’s right-liberal wing and sap this internal competitor’s potency. Their main sponsor is Hans Peter Haselsteiner, the principal shareholder in Strabag, of whose family ties with the green giant little need be said. The NEOS emerged from the Liberal Forum, whose founder, Karl Sevelda (an old Creditanstalt veteran), was hired by Raiffeisenbank International a few years after starting the party and became the bank’s chairman for a spell in the ’10s. In other words: the working hypothesis is that the call to terminate negotiations came from somewhere in the upper echelons of the Raiffeisen imperium.
On January 4th, coalition talks between the ÖVP and the SPÖ fall apart, prompting Nehammer’s resignation. I will not burden J’accuse’s readers with the details other than to say that the main sticking point was an ordinary, humdrum budgetary dispute — EU fiscal rules prohibit members’ deficits from exceeding 3% of GDP, and an „unforeseen“ recession (by Woke economists overconfident in their predictions of post-corona recovery and stabilised European energy costs) caused what would otherwise have been a perfectly compliant budget to slip into the danger zone. Oblivious to the world moving at an ever increasing velocity around it, postwar social democracy struck up the old chords: the ÖVP favoured spending cuts, while the SPÖ preferred a cocktail of higher taxes — why can’t they just be reasonable! One particular apple of discord was a bank tax, resolutely opposed by both the ÖVP’s agrarian (i.e. Raiffeisen) and commercial sub-organisations — this was not the sole reason for the collapse of negotiations, but I mention it because it will take on an important role later.
On January 6th, the President of Austria (what a loathsome phrase!), Alexander van der Bellen, receives FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl in the Hofburg and formally entrusts him with the task of forming government. This presidential blessing is a necessity for coalition talks to officially begin — and was initially refused to Kickl, who, as leader of the largest „club“ in parliament, by tradition enjoyed the right of first go. This was widely interpreted as pure virtue signalling (the feuilletons launched a grand offensive against „negotiating with fascists“, the superciliousness of which presumably boosted the FPÖ a few points): Kickl-led coalition negotiations, if held immediately after the election, would doubtless have failed due to Karl Nehammer’s unrecalcitrant confidence in the success of talks with the NEOS and the Social Democrats. By denying the FPÖ their right, van der Bellen bought Kickl time; time for a clear resolution to the Trump Question to be found (the Austrian election took place on September 29th, thus well before the American one) and for Nehammer to wear himself out in fruitless coalition negotiations with the devious Mme. Meinl-Reisinger and the SPÖ’s lumbering neomarxist leader Babler.
On January 17th, Strabag CEO Klemens Haselsteiner passes away at the age of 44. Coalition negotiations between the ÖVP and FPÖ begin the same day.
Also on January 17th, Peter Pilz, a former Green MP and one-time van der Bellen doctoral student (this last part will be important) whose investigate journalism website ZackZack offered an invaluable glimpse into the misdeeds of all ÖVP factions during the Kurz years, announces a new scoop: an upcoming book claiming foul play in the death of Christian Pilnacek, the once powerful Justice Ministry mandarin and the ÖVP’s fixer in that department. During Kurz and Kickl’s assault on the Lower Austrian networks in the bureaucracy, Pilnacek apparently sided with the former, and was marginalised at the ministry during the Raiffeisen bloc’s post-Ibiza purge (which came back to haunt them, since the „red networks“ in the procuratory that Pilnacek had struggled against did not draw the line at the ministry headquarters in the Neustiftgasse, but took the fight all the way to St. Pölten), but the rumour made the rounds in the Ringstraße cafes that the old tiger still had teeth, was out for vengeance, and kept a little black USB stick whose contents might one day wind up on Mr. Kickl’s laptop. In the early hours of October 20th, 2023, local police found Pilnacek dead in his car on a riverbank near Krems in Lower Austria in an apparent suicide — the USB stick was not accounted for (it also later transpired that Lower Austrian State Police raided his house in Vienna shortly after his death and confiscated various objects in a blatantly illegal out-of-area mission).
On January 23rd, police in Innsbruck took former Signa Holding chairman René Benko into custody. Disentangling l’affaire Benko, the web of shell companies and arcane legal constructs spun by this Tyrolean high school dropout, has been too elaborate a task for Europe’s financial regulators and is thus too elaborate for this paragraph (Spiegel gives a good rundown), and little has in any case changed since I last wrote about it in J’accuse. While the „deep politics“ of Signa remain too murky for the real raw light of truth to penetrate, what is evident is that Raiffeisen is at the thick of things. Signa’s managing director, Christoph Stadlhuber, is the (former) son-in-law of Christian Konrad, the man at the centre of the Raiffeisen web — the notion that his star has fallen in Raiffeisenworld through his dubious association with Benko can be thoroughly refuted by the fact that he recently landed a cushy sinecure as a consultant to a subsidiary of the Lower Austrian state insurance company (i.e. another arm of the Pröll/Konrad galaxy) on a project for a „Dubai in the Weinviertel“. Never let it be said that Raiffeisen bankers don’t have a sense of humour.
On January 29th, polling at close to 40%, the FPÖ negotiators demand a bank tax as part of any future coalition agreement.
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