The World and I

I used to laugh at a friend who bought The Sun (the UK’s leading tabloid paper) every week. But as she explained to me, she reads, the little there is to read between the large pictures, because it is the news that sways the majority and thus extremely important to countries politics.

Austrian politicians have recently had to experience this as it was a tabloid paper that resulted in the grand coalition that formed to Austrian government to break up. The Kronen Zeitung (Austria’s Tabloid) is in fact the most read paper (per capita) in the world. Thus when our current Chancellor Gusenbauer decided to write a letter to the Editor, to be published in the paper, he knew he would be appealing to the masses, his goal.

Unfortunately what he said and the fact that he said it through the Tabloid, instead of to his collegues, our Ministers, was not very clever. Referring to the current EU Lisbon Treaty, whose future is in limbo as the Irish voted no to it, Gusenbauer suggested that in the future the Austrian population would also get to vote on any Treaties pertaining to the EU.

Backtracking a bit to get the full picture, after previous failed attempts to introduce a quasi EU constitution, Ministers from the EU countries decided to water down the treaty and publish it in the form of the Lisbon Treaty. Furthermore, many countries decided that instead of opening up the Treaty to popular vote, which would most likely fail again, since citizens who are not familiar with the exact intricacies of the these documents, worry about a loss of sovereignity, governments would vote to pass the treaty themselves. Only Ireland insisted on keeping the popular vote, convinced they could sway the population to vote in favour of it by a large pro-EU campaign. 

Austria was among those countries, which decided to ratify the treaty through parliament as opposed to popular vote and this descision was made in full consensus of both leading coalition party, the Socialist Party (Gusenbauer’s party) and the Austrian People’s Party. 

Therefore, this major turnaround as reported in the tabloid, came as a major surprise to everyone and understandably infuriated not only Gusenbauer’s coalition partners but his own party as he went behind their backs and straight to the tabloid.

Thus what my friend has been trying to explain to me all these years became clear: the power of the tabloid.