Dispute in the SPÖ: “Feelings” at “kindergarten level”

Austria’s social democrats are fighting internal struggles on the open stage. Party leader Rendi-Wagner and a leading state politician approach each other sharply in public. Behind this are unresolved questions of direction.

“Dismantling to kindergarten level” – this is the headline of Austria’s daily newspapers such as the “Presse”. Although the conflict between SPÖ leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner and the Burgenland governor Hans Peter Doskozil has long been a constant topic in the local media: Now the party leaders seem to have reached a threshold to ask both of them to immediately stop the publicly carried out allegations. In any case, Vienna’s SPÖ mayor Michael Ludwig announced that public discussions “on personal matters” would not help anyone, not the people involved and of course not the SPÖ either.

And the governor of Carinthia, Peter Kaiser, demands far more clearly: “Put an end to the arguments, go into a room, discuss things with one another, the scraps can fly there, but then the red smoke should rise.”

“Not even the political opponent acts like that”

The latest trigger of the violent controversy between the chairman of the SPÖ and the Burgenland party leader was an interview with the private broadcaster “Puls 4” last weekend, in which Rendi-Wagner stated that she had asked Doskozil to hold a joint press conference on asylum policy, which the latter in turn refused. One day later, however, according to Rendi-Wagner, “and all the days after that” Doskozil gave interviews, made public statements “and said that there is no line in the SPÖ, which, by the way, is not true he is very inconsistent that he is dishonest and that is a shame for the former hope of our party “.

Doskozil, Minister of the Interior in the former grand coalition between the SPÖ and the conservative People’s Party, stands for a much tougher course in asylum and refugee policy within the party. As party leader of the Burgenland SPÖ, the governor was able to win an absolute majority in January 2020 – now a rarity for Austrian social democracy. In response to the latest attacks by his party leaders this week, Doskozil replied that he would not lower himself to such a “kindergarten level”, after all he had already warned that the party did not need a personnel discussion: “We don’t have to tarnish each other. That’s already a mutual tarnishing . So if I listen to these things: Not even the political opponents in Burgenland act like that. ”

Party leader badly damaged

Within the party, the SPÖ chairwoman, a doctor of medicine who only joined the party when she was appointed Minister of Health in 2017, has a difficult position Percent of the delegates vote a bitter damper. In the social democracy, according to the political scientist Anton Pelinka on ORF, what has long been smoldering is now breaking out: the personal conflict is third-rate. In the foreground is “that social democracy has evaded the question of how it really stands on crucial questions for years – such as access to citizenship, such as immigration to Austria. Austria is a country of immigration, but social democracy has actually not found an answer because it is within the party Directions exist that are mutually exclusive. ”

Rendi-Wagner’s party chairmanship does not appear to be in immediate jeopardy at the moment: no leading SPÖ politician has openly announced his claim to want to be her successor. According to some comments in the Austrian media, nobody wants to have this office in this situation.