Covidistan Annals V: Hours After the Régime Pretended to be in Charge, Protesters Break Through Police Barriers in Vienna

This is the end / Beautiful friend / This is the end / My only friend, the end

tweetI’m quite busy working on two larger, more demanding pieces, yet I’ve decided to put them aside to keep you posted about what’s going on in Covidistan literally right now.

Before we get started on today’s events, a brief word of caution: while my track record of ‘predicting’ how these events would play out is, frankly, quite o.k. (see here), especially my three-part series, entitled ‘Limping Towards Catharsis’ from two weeks ago (here, here, and here), which held up remarkably well, I think.

This isn’t to claim victory of any sort, but to prepare you for the below analysis, which focuses on two main series of events:

1. In the morning, the régime claimed to be in charge and in control

2. A mere handful of hours later, protesters break through police barriers

There’s also a brief comment with my thoughts about the next moves at the bottom of this post. That said, let’s have a look.

All is quiet in Covidistan earlier this week—the régime thought

There’s quite a lot going on in Covidistan these days, with the main threads being the continued house arrest for ‘the unvaccinated’, ongoing preparations of the compulsory vaccination legislation, and the fear-porn surrounding Omicron.

Yet, if one cuts through the fog of these agit-prop/aganda wars, two items are clear for everyone who has eyes to see and read, ears to hear, and is open to think for him- or herself:

The régime is extremely brittle, mainly due to ever-shifting ‘narratives’ that continue to be a ‘challenge’ for those who pretend to be in control. In Covidistan, this means, e.g., the official media watchdog opening an investigation into the one private TV station that allows for ‘dissenting’ voices to appear.

Then there’s the chairwoman of Covidistan’s self-declared libertarian party ‘New Austria’ who went on last Sunday’s main TV talk show to claim that ‘compulsory vaccinations shall make all of us free’ (I’m not making this up, by the way; note that I’m freely using US parlance here; that faction is actually rabidly pro-market/neoliberal while also emphasising individualism, hence my choice of words).

And then there was the request by Covidistan’s equivalent of the Business Round Table-and-Chamber of Commerce to disallow any protests before 6 p.m. local time that were scheduled for today. Why, you may ask—to allow consumers to shop in peace and businesses to hold at least one Saturday-before-Christmas shopping feast, as if to compensate for income lost due to the régime’s actions. Needless to say, police complied.

All of the above (and much more), brings us to today’s events.

Meet ‘GECKO’, the régime’s new plaything

According to a gigantic presser earlier today, Chancellor Nehammer and his crew brought the military aboard. Recognising that trust in the régime and its capabilities is abysmally low, a new task force (nick-named ‘GECKO’ for one of these weird German-language descriptions) that specifically included the army was announced. It all looked surreal enough (see the picture below), but in the end it was fairly conventional, with Maj. General Striedinger and Chief Medical Officer Reich contributing ‘operative and medical competences’.

Weirdly enough, no new structures or decision-making procedures were announced. It’s all a (shit-) show, which differs nothing at-all from the régime’s previous MO. According to state broadcaster ORF, the priorities remain: ‘vaccinate, test, and medicate’:

Omicron means that the virus is becoming more insidious, Mückstein said: ‘Experts are already seeing the next wave on the horizon’, which is why we need to work together to ‘fight it with all our might’. This means more testing, more sequencing, more vaccination throughout the country, he said, and the new task force signifies that resources would now be interlinked…

The vaccination campaign was an enormous success of science that saved ‘countless lives to date and will continue to do so well into the future’. Still, the vaccination drive must be intensified and more and better information must be provided…everyone can get their vaccination [Mückstein added]. Reich appealed to people to get vaccinated, saying, ‘Give yourself a Christmas present’, adding that the third jab in particular is important because of the Omicron variant.

State media was drooling, yet the Green-sympathising daily Der Standard actually provided even weirder coverage. There are fawning portraits of the key actors (sic), including strange pictures, and, my personal favourite, the listing of qualifications of the ‘GECKO’ members: it’s a true who-is-who of Covidistan’s players, including the régime (federal and state politicos), academics, and journalists, as well as a host of other people from all walks of ‘civil society’ (sidenote: if you’re wondering about this term, it’s all government-affiliated stake-holders; I’m sorry if you thought that would include, well, people like you and me, but that’s the propaganda trick employed here).

In short: the entire charade was a media/agit-prop event designed perhaps to shore up support and affirm the faithful adherents to the Covidistan creed that ‘we’ve got this’.

As I mentioned above, it took about a handful of hours to provide evidence of the nakedness of Chancellor Nehammer and his fellow Covid putschists.

The Tide is Turning

Around lunchtime, from the Tyrol (one of Covidistan’s western states, home to infamous Ischgl, après ski parteys, and super-dependent on tourism), an MP from Nehammer’s ÖVP and lobbyist for the ski-lift operators’ association, one Franz Hörl, voiced his discontent quite publicly:

Soon everyone will know someone who doesn’t know a thing!

Everything that serves to contain the spread of Omicron without a lockdown must be done, However, it remains incomprehensible why this must always at the last minute and without coordination with the Chamber of Commerce. The latter has been ironing out the Health Minister’s disastrous PR ventures for 21 months and counting!

This is an unacceptable last-minute action…the travel advice is a miserable piece of regulation [late on Friday, Mückstein updated immigration procedures for the Christmas tourism season]…and Secretary Mückstein should now quickly create clarity and coordinate with our experts in the Chamber of Commerce.

That’s not all. Around 3 p.m. (local time), Der Standard reported this nugget (my emphases):

The current situation in Vienna is unclear at the moment. Until a few moments ago, all was quiet…a small rally organised by the anti-vaccine mandate faction MFG [a protest party that arose in the wake of increasing pressure to get jabbed] was particularly popular at Schwarzenbergplatz, where several hundred people gathered…

Unlike in previous weeks…at Heldenplatz there was a large police contingent. Thus, protesters mostly marched in smaller groups with flags and placards, moving towards Schwarzenbergplatz from various places in the city centre. At the site of the protest, there were speeches against ‘testing and vaccination stress’…

Police had declared that they would not allow larger demonstrations in Vienna’s city centre until 6 p.m. this time because of the reopened shopping venues.

Federal police, upon noticing that protesters—who were not allowed to march—started to move, tweeted:

Protesters try to stage a prohibited march starting from #Schwarzenbergplatz. This will be prevented with all our might. We activate our barriers in this area.

Yet, judging from footage online, tweeting was all they did.

According to police and media reports, there were some 2,000 protestors (again, multiply by at least x4 to get to a more accurate number), yet police was incapable to stop them. Perhaps they had orders not to do anything, or perhaps they had orders but officers at the site elected to ignore them.

Check out this tweet that shows the moment protestors breached the police barrier. It’s 10:33 p.m. as I write this, and the tweet has been checked out in excess of 230K times:

Do check out the exasperated account over at Der Standard, with plenty of other embedded footage. It’s ‘dramatic’, as in—breathless: there’s an account that the ‘vaccination site’ in Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral ‘had to be protected’, reports of traffic jams, and, my personal favourite, a tweet that shows the police’s passivity (helplessness).

Without surprises, most régime supporters—especially the Greens—immediately started to criticise police. Reported gleefully by Der Standard, prominent Green politicians called on police to ‘explain their failure’, asking how on God’s green earth would police be ‘incapable of dealing with this protest, especially as their numbers were much smaller than in previous weeks’?

Well, as a public service announcement, here’s my answer.

Covidistan’s régime is almost done

There are basically two options left for the Committee of Public Safety:

1. Apply as much violence as possible (necessary) and force the issue.

2. End this coup, call it quits, and resign.

Neither of these options is ‘good’.

Given the very bad polling data, neither putschist party is willing to relinquish power.

I’m basically convinced that they’d like to go for option #1, but the régime knows it can’t depend on police (see these above-linked tweets). It would also be super-bad PR and would short-circuit the régime to option #2.

In other words: there’s no good option left, hence my ‘advice’ a few weeks ago: if you’re in a hole, stop digging. Yet, the Committee elected to double down and triple jab the populace, hence they don’t know what to do.

A few days ago, the régime gracefully allowed ‘the unvaccinated’ some reprieve and announced they could actually celebrate Christmas.

It’s an affront, hence today’s protests. There were other protests in at least two state capitals, too, all without mainstream (Freedom) party organisation.

I have no idea why the régime thought they’d get away with this. I think—and here I speak from experience (a long time ago, I worked in the Foreign Office for a year)—that the régime drinks its own kool aid, a lot thereof, hence they are intoxicated by both the arrogance of power and they are choking on their own propaganda (BS).

Here’s what I think is going to happen after the Christmas break (and remember, the vaxx mandate is supposedly entering into force on 1 Feb. 2022):

There will be more and larger protests, with police morale down and their willingness to stand in-between angry people ever more limited.

At some point, this régime will break, and I think it’ll happen in late January or early February, i.e., it’ll be broken by the vaxx mandate.

What happens then?

Here, I see three options, neither is ‘good’:

1. Another set of new heads but the same factions try to hand on (quite unlikely, this is probably impossible even for the spineless halfwit serving as president).

2. A caretaker gov’t to ensure continued governance until elections will be held in late 2022 (there was one such gov’t in 2019 after the Ibiza Scandal broke).

3. New elections in spring 2022, which will see the explosive rise of the Freedom Party and, as a consequence of Covidistan’s electoral laws, a ‘national unity gov’t’ that specifically excludes the Freedom Party (with that its only raison d’être, you can perhaps count on your own fingers how long such an arrangement would last).

My money is on option #2, which remains the relatively best of these three bad, if not worse options.

What’s your take?