Region: Euroskeptic party rises in local polls

Businessman Frank Stronach's euroskeptic party performed well in local elections in Austria last weekend, winning almost 10 percent of the votes in the eastern province of Lower Austria and 11.3 percent in Carinthia in the south.

Stronach, a billionaire who made his fortune in Canada, already commands six seats in the lower chamber of Parliament and will compete for more in September's election. Polls predict the social democratic Chancellor Werner Faymann will maintain his majority coalition with the conservatives, but Stronach has tapped into Austrians' mounting frustration with the European sovereign debt crisis.

Austrians are the fourth-richest people in Europe and have enjoyed modest yearly economic expansion since they joined the euro in 2002. While the eurozone's economy as a whole contracted last year, Austria's grew 0.6 percent.

The Alpine nation's economy is highly dependent on trade with neighboring Germany, and its foreign policy follows suit. Like the Germans, the Austrians insist on fiscal consolidation in Europe and liberalization to boost the competitiveness of member states in the south.

In May of last year, Austria's Christian Democratic Finance Minister Maria Fekter sharply criticized the possibility of fiscal stimulus as championed by then-newly elected French President François Hollande. "Growth financed by debt? Those are the recipes from the day before yesterday," she said.

Austria itself struggled to keep its deficit under the European Union's 3 percent treaty maximum, however, but is expected to bring it down to 2.3 percent of gross domestic product this year.

As is the case in Germany, the Netherlands and other relatively strong economies in the "core" of the euro area, many Austrian voters are dissatisfied with what they perceive as the bailing out of weaker states in the periphery of the currency union at their expense.

Stronach's euroskeptic rhetoric appeals to them, although his proposal for "renegotiating" the euro, as his party's platform promises, is somewhat unclear. The billionaire himself has suggested leaving the eurozone altogether, but two of his chief economic advisors were more ambivalent in an interview with Format magazine Feb. 15. While they argued "the euro is at an end," they floated the idea of keeping it as a parallel currency.

Stronach's victory in Carinthia March 4 came largely at the expense of the nationalist Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) that was led by the region's former governor, Jörg Haider, until his death in 2008.

In late January, Haider's successor Heinz-Christian Strache, whose party is still the third-largest in parliament, called for a referendum on Austria's euro membership. "If the EU develops into a centralized superstate, the final consequence for Austria would be an EU exit," he told Österreich newspaper Jan. 23. "I would rather have an alliance with Switzerland."

Like Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, Switzerland is effectively part of the European single market, but 76.8 percent of Swiss voters rejected full European Union membership in 2001.

Stronach's party gets about 10 percent support nationwide but polls show up to a third of Austrians maintain that joining the euro was a mistake. Strache's party hovers around 20 percent support in surveys, still attracting the majority of euroskeptic voters.

Local elections in Tyrol, one of Austria's most conservative states, next month will be another test for Stronach's popularity. Salzburg, where the Social Democrats now command a plurality of the seats in the regional legislature, votes later in April or in early May. If Stronach does well in both regions, his party might well replace the FPÖ as the champion of the populist right, albeit without the latter's anti-immigration rhetoric.

Nick Ottens can be reached at
news@praguepost.com