Law, Politics, and Virtue Signalling

An Austrian Parable from the Distant Past of 2019

As we continue to document the madness of the Coronavirus Crisis, significant changes have been announced in Europe’s post-1945 political ‘shire’ (no offence, J.R.R. Tolkien, I really liked your books). As befits unpopular efforts of housecleaning, around 10 p.m. local time last Friday, new Chancellor A. Schallenberg from the conservative ‘New People’s Party™’ and Health Secretary W. Mückstein (Greens) announced a stringent set of new anti-Covid measures to mimic the government’s readiness for autumn and winter 2021/22.

As per the Daily Mail, these measures were to be quite stringent, for they envision a ‘Covid lockdown for the unvaccinated ONLY that would confine people without jabs to their homes except for “authorised” reasons [sic]’.

‘The pandemic is not yet in the rearview mirror,’ Schallenberg said. ‘We are about to stumble into a pandemic of the unvaccinated.’

Schallenberg announced that if the number of Covid patients in intensive-care units reaches 500, or 25 percent of the country's total ICU capacity, entrance into businesses such as restaurants and hotels will be limited to those who are vaccinated or recovered from the virus.

If the number reaches 600, or one-third of total ICU capacity, the government plans to impose restrictions on unvaccinated people. In this case, they would only be allowed to leave their homes for specific reasons.

In a glowing piece, former news organisation and current government mouthpiece Austrian daily Der Standard, added a brief ‘op-ed’ of the health minister that is telling in a number of ways. Apart from serving the health minister’s narcissistic streak (see the photo in the linked content), it contained two valuable nuggets of (mis-) information. As the staff writer held, the new strict measures were due (my emphasis):

Because vaccine hesitancy has become the driving force behind the Corona crisis - this is reflected in the numbers: In Vienna alone, 86 percent of the people who need intensive medical treatment for a Covid 19 infection are currently not fully immunised.

Leaving the data aside (discussion here), the op-ed writer’s primary concern is that (my emphasis):

the mere announcement of a possible unvaccinated-only lockdown sets a next step of division in society… On both sides, anger at each other is cemented in…The fact that the state’s opinion is imposed on you, that you are restricted and ultimately imprisoned—this is what drives the ‘doubters and waverers’, as Schallenberg calls them, not into the vaccination centres but into the arms of the Corona-denying parties and groups.

Well, well, well. Who would have guess that plot twist? Let’s briefly take this apart, for what happened is the following:

On Friday evening (22 Oct. 2021), around 10 p.m., the government announced a stringent set of measures. There is no legal basis for this, as Mückstein readily admitted (watch the event): the government will work on the executive order (Verordnung) sometime next week.

This is nothing but a press conference, or media stunt. In saner days, this would have been called ‘agit-prop’ or, to use today’s terminology borrowed from U.S. discourse, ‘gaslighting’. It’s government by press briefing, and if that doesn’t remind you of J. Biden’s comparable ‘stunt’ that announced a ‘vaccine mandate’ in early September that has not been followed up by anything resembling promulgation of rules or regulations as of this writing, reported even the Wall Street Journal in weeks later.

In other words: it’s politics dictating the law, or, more precisely, it’s dictatorship by secondary legislation.

It does remind me of something someone said a long, long time ago. You see, back in the good ol’ days of early 2019, Herbert Kickl, then Secretary of the Interior of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (careful, it’s a quite Orwellian translation), speaking about his party’s stringent anti-asylum rights stance, said the following about the relationship between politics and the law:

The law has to follow the politics and not the politics the law.

Of course, Kickl was chastised by all opposition parties, virtually all media in the country, and this entire affair provided the juste milieu with yet another reason to hate the person instead of engaging in the arguments provided about charities and NGOs profiteering from the ‘asylum crisis’ (it’s the same with Austrian education policy since the 1970s, but that shall wait for another comment). There are plenty of examples (see here or here), but that’s not the point.

In Friday’s announcements, we can clearly see the same dynamic: politicians provide the direction, the law must follow. Constitutional Law Professor Karl Weber (U Innsbruck) back in early 2019 said the following, as reported by Der Standard (and cited by Swiss daily Der Tagesanzeiger)

‘What the Minister of the Interior says is completely incompatible with a constitutional state [Rechtsstaat]…If a student were to write in an exam that the law has to follow politics, he would fail.’

Now, for a fun thought experiment, substitute ‘Health’ for ‘Interior’ and think again. Needless to say that no law professor or journalist called out Health Secretary Mückstein these days.

Odd, how the times, they are a’changin’.