Can this man be chancellor? Officially, no one will dare to ask this question at the SPÖ party conference in Graz. But it resonates when Andreas Babler is discussed and ultimately voted on. The bar for what result the Traiskirchen mayor should achieve is actually quite low: In any case, he has to deliver a better election result than Pamela Rendi-Wagner when she last ran in June 2021, which was a meager 75.3 percent at the time.
This time, with only one candidate, you only need to know the simplest basic arithmetic and can do without Excel tables. Because the chaos party conference is still a bad memory for many comrades and no opposing candidate dares to come out of cover this time, the vote is likely to be acceptable. Although some people may vote for Babler not out of conviction but for reasons of self-protection. If the SPÖ leader does not meet the low target, then the party will have an even bigger problem than previously foreseeable: The fact that the SPÖ is not united is shown by the demonstrative absence of the grandees from Vienna and Burgenland. Even the most egomaniacal comrade, Hans Peter Doskozil, must have realized that a chairman debate almost a year before the election would be untimely.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is rallying behind Babler. Since his election at the beginning of June, he has failed to create a sense of optimism. Neither inside nor outside the party. At around 24 percent, the SPÖ is roughly where it was in Rendi-Wagner’s last weeks in office.
Babler has not managed to make it clear what the SPÖ and himself stand for. There is a lot of gossip in this party. If you look at the twelve key proposals for the party conference, it becomes clear: Babler wants to position the SPÖ to the left of center, against capitalist excesses, and to strengthen the lower income earners at the expense of the “upper ten thousand”. It is cheap to make demands; but at the same time not answering the question of how all of this should be financed point by point is more than a shortcoming.
In general, a lot remains vague. The demand for the introduction of a 32-hour week was previously considered Babler’s heartfelt project, but now there will only be pilot tests to implement it with full wage compensation. Attempts are being made to keep the controversial issue of migration within the party small. But the question must be clarified: Does the paper drawn up by Peter Kaiser and Hans Peter Doskozil from 2019 still apply, which envisages reception centers at the EU’s external borders? And what is the SPÖ’s position on the Middle East conflict? This should also be clarified five weeks after the start of the war in Gaza in a party that maintains its claim to appoint the chancellor.
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