Five months and two failed coalition attempts after Austria’s federal election in September, president Alexander Van der Bellen swore in a new centrist government on Monday with an amused note of warning: “All’s well that ends well”.
It took two attempts for a new coalition to come together in Vienna that avoided postwar Austria’s first extreme-right chancellor.
The government will be led by the centre-right People’s Party (OVP) and its 64-year-old interim leader Christian Stocker. A low-profile electrician-turned party functionary, Stocker only entered parliament in 2019. Now he is heading a government backed by the Social Democrats (SPO) and, in a first, the liberal Neos.
“Probably it would have been more tempting to remain stubborn but stubborn does not a government make,” said Van der Bellen, a nod to the collapse of the three parties’ first round of talks.
That opened the door to the prospect of a OVP-backed coalition lead by the nationalist populist Freedom Party (FPO), until those talks collapsed as well.
At Vienna’s hulking Hofburg Palace on Monday, Austria’s president made clear that the country’s democracy had dodged a bullet. Without naming the FPO, he urged the new coalition to address the pressing issues and do more to defend liberal democracy against its enemies.
The president demanded a “clear, just line” on migration that balanced asylum rights with “consistent measures against irregular migration” as well as new, fairer balances on economic competitiveness and social security.
The new government takes office at a time of recession with rising unemployment and budget tensions. The OVP will control interior and defence ministries while the Social Democrats have taken the finance and justice portfolios with the liberal Neos leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger heading foreign affairs.
Its 200-page second attempt at a coalition agreements leaves many key policy points open, however, with political analyst Thomas Hofer predicting tensions given the far-right FPO is now in opposition despite winning last September’s election.
“The rise and dominance of the FPO is derived from the fact that the previously dominant parties have created a leadership vacuum, they were just too defensive like a rabbit staring at a snake,” he said, resulting in the kind of voter loss of confidence in the mainstream palpable across Europe.
Across the border in Germany, preliminary coalition talks began on Monday with a row over debt and borrowing between the first-placed Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and third-placed Social Democratic Party (SPD).
CDU leader Friedrich Merz, Germany’s likely next chancellor, is pushing for a last-minute meeting of the old Bundestag to rush through emergency spending measures.
According to Merz officials, MPs will be presented either with a plan to top up or replace the so-called “special fund”, a €100 billion off-balance sheet vehicle established three years ago by Germany for urgent military spending.
The leaked CDU plan has annoyed the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), which has been pushing for a shift away from ad-hoc spending to a reform of stringent debt rules that limit borrowing.
Time is tight for the incoming coalition: any such measures would require a two-thirds supermajority, which the parties have in the old but not the new Bundestag, expected to hold its first sitting at the end of March.
SPD co-leader Saskia Esken was said to be furious at the CDU leaks and on Monday promised to “be joyfully annoying” in the evening round of preliminary talks.
A CDU-SPD coalition is the only viable centrist alliance after a surge in support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Unlike in Vienna, there is as yet no guarantee in Berlin that all will end well.
