The World and I
Asti's musings on the (non)functioning world
Austria's "Representative" Democracy
I remember March of last year where I attended the
U8conference when Salil Shetty, the head of the Millenium
DevelopmentCampaign gave a speech. He started off by taking a show
of hands of those conference participants who were from developing
countries and those who were from developed countries. The third
survey he took was which of us believed our governments truly
represented what we wanted them too - at this point nobody raised
their hands. This proved a very good point, no matter where you are
from in the world you can always be frustrated at your government.
Austria is a representative democracy so essentially we should
have the best chances of voting and ultimately getting what we
asked for. However, as the last few months and particularly days
have proved, this is definitely not the case. In Austria we vote
for a party and if a particular party attains absolute majority
they can nominate all the ministers, including the chancellor. If
however, no party attains a majority then coalitions have to be
built between parties and then they between them decide which party
can nominate which minister.
In the last election the Socialist Party (SPÖ) won the
election without a majority and so after long and cumbersome
negotiations, decided to form a coalition with the Austrian
People's Party (ÖVP). However, either due to bad negotiation skills
(or the more likely cause of other influencing factors), the head
of the SPÖ at the time, Gusenbauer, came out of the negotiations as
our new chancellor, however, allowed the People's Party to nominate
ministers for the most important ministries. This never bode well
as we were a divided government from the start with the chancellor
from the one party and the important ministers from the
other.
However, this has become especially evident in the past couple
of days with our government crumbling in front of our eyes, new
elections seem the most likely consequence. The problem is, with
the electorate highly frustrated at the current situation, that the
happy winner in new elections will be the right wing party
(Austrian Freedom Party, FPÖ), who are currently polling third.
This has already happened once in the recent past and Austria was
lablled by the world as a right-winged country. However, it is not
so much out of admiration of their policies, that they do well, it
is more the fact that they are the one party that stick to their
policies and you know what you are going to get when you vote for
them.
Although I pray this will not be the case, as things stand, it
does unfortunately seem likely...
0 Comments