Now I dared to go to Germany for a short day, but of course I immediately regretted it. You can’t even leave Austria out of sight for a few hours.
Of the new Federal Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg Armin Wolf gave an interview in ZiB2 in which he managed to say “I was sworn in 48 hours ago” more often than the words Sebastian and Kurz. The former chancellor (you almost shy away from writing that about a 35-year-old) shortly afterwards affirmed in a video messagethat he was just as eaten away by anger and resignation as many of his supporters, although this anger and this resignation can of course be interpreted differently. Maybe not all fans are angry for him anymore, but because of him?
In the meantime, a deletion operation in the ministries was apparently prevented in parliament on Thursday, although one does not know exactly whether one will be late here and there. Is it also true that a few hours before the House searches on October 6th there was actually a FedEx car standing in front of the Chancellery and unknown young people loading laptops, monitors and files, that too is not certain; maybe someone just wanted to do some fall cleaning in their office?
The ÖVP party finances of 2019 could also not be entirely in order
However, the loading action may also have had other reasons; in the meantime everything is believed to be possible when high-ranking employees can even dup the finance ministry’s bookkeeping for their own purposes. It is not for nothing that the Court of Auditors suggests that the party finances of the ÖVP may not have been so entirely in order in 2019, as in 2017. A little question about this: How do you actually book souped-up invoices and advertising corruption in a party balance sheet – as a pecuniary benefit?
But actually I wanted to tell something completely different. I was recently in a discussion program that was moderated by the wonderful Corinna Milborn, and next to me sat the moderator and author Dirk Stermann, who kept saying “Every hippie has to go to Pippi”. We now know that he wanted to win a bet against his partner at “Willkommen Österreich”, Christoph Grissemann. During the show, giggling all the time, I suggested shortening the somewhat awkward wording and just always saying HP – for hippie and pippi – but my idea was lost a bit in terms of sound technology.
Now I would like to take it up again. Couldn’t we just shorten the chats and the investigations and the Fellners and the Schmids and the old and new chancellors and everything else that has accumulated in the current discourse? HP for “House of Short Chat Protocols”? Then you wouldn’t always have to explain everything from the beginning and write it down page by page; there are enough new things to tell every day.
Waiting for new videos, arrests, confessions or chat transcripts
When the ÖVP corruption investigation committee, which follows the Ibiza investigation committee, is started in about two months, then, like in a decent soap, we will have at least partly the same actors, but always new consequences, always new crises and always new ones Cliffhanger. It feels like the clarification can take forever, because the judiciary will continue to search more rather than less and maybe also find it.
In any case, I’m going into the weekend in the hope that Stermanns Hippie can look forward to a traffic light coalition and an ambitious government program in Berlin, where, at least Stermann claimed, he comes from. In Austria, meanwhile, people are waiting for new videos by Sebastian Kurz, possibly for further arrests, confessions or new chat protocols. Therefore, here is a third variant, only for relaxed weekends: HP for Happy Procrastination.
This column will appear on October 15, 2021 in the Austria Newsletter, which will be reporting on Austria in the Süddeutsche Zeitung bundles. Register here for free.