The End of Covidistan, pt. 3: Third Massive State Election Blowout Triggers Leadership Crisis Among the Social Democrats
The End of Covidistan, pt. 3: Third Massive State Election Blowout Triggers Leadership Crisis Among the Social Democrats
As a plus, neither the pro-NATO hawks of NEOS nor the Greens made it over the 4% threshold in Carinthia. Next state elections to take place on 23 April in Salzburg
This past weekend saw yet another state election, this time in Austro-Covidistan’s southernmost state Carinthia. After elections in the Tyrol and Lower Austria—both dominated by the conservative (in-name-only) People’s Party (ÖVP)—Carinthia is governed by the Social Democrats (SPÖ).
If you’re new to these pages, please refer to parts one and two of this occasional series.
These three state elections were the first polls after the infamous injection mandate was first suspended (in Feb./March 2022) and ultimately revoked before it was enforced in June/July of last year. In all three elections, the main governing party—twice the ÖVP (Tyrol, Lower Austria), now also once the SPÖ—lost big time, that is, around -10%.
That’s a huge loss, no doubt about it, and it means even ‘more’ in Austria given its very proportionate so-called D’Hondt, or Jefferson, method of allocating seats in parliament.
Here’s what state broadcaster ORF had to say yesterday:
Three elections, one picture: For the third time in a row, the party of the provincial governor has lost more than nine percentage points. After the ÖVP in Tyrol and Lower Austria, it is now the SPÖ in Carinthia, which remains the strongest force, but has to accept a serious drop. While the FPÖ and the ÖVP made gains, the election brought other clear losers.
Governor Peter Kaiser’s SPÖ ended up with 38.9%, a loss of a whopping nine percent. The FPÖ followed in second place with 24.6%, a plus of 1.6%. The ÖVP gained just as much, which means a clear third place with 17%. Early projections had predicted an even greater gain. In view of the pre-election polls, which had predicted losses for the ÖVP, the ÖVP was jubilant.
So, there you have it: the ÖVP, which currently holds the chancellorship on the federal level, is ‘jubilant’ because they gained less than 2%.
I’m for one at a loss of words: why are they celebrating? I mean, let’s face it, ÖVP: the one and only reason why you didn’t lose is that, contrary to the Tyrol and Lower Austria, the SPÖ is currently in charge of Carinthia.
Be that as it may, the ÖVP interpreted this result—mind you: they were in the third place, and they stayed there, too, with absolutely no chance to get elsewhere—as tantamount to a ‘reversal of trends’ (Trendwende) after the two shellackings they took in the Tyrol and Lower Austria. You couldn’t make this up.
Requiem for the SPÖ
Here’s what I wrote a few days before the election in Carinthia:
These days, one can observe a strange spectacle in Austria: the end of Social Democracy, whose achievements all hark back to the pre-EU era. What does the SPÖ stand for today? For hypocrisy (immigration) and evidence-free tyranny (‘Viennese Way’ with respect to extra-harsh Covid mandates), coupled with incompetence (government responsibility) that makes even the Conservative-Green government appear almost ‘statesmanlike’.
It is quite impressive how much legacy media play up the perceived—staged—and irrelevant ‘power struggles’ within the SPÖ leadership. There is talk of ‘chaos in the SPÖ’ (Heute), Die Presse reported on [Burgenland governor Hans-Peter] Doskozil’s statements (‘There will be personnel discussions’), and Der Standard, reflecting on the Doskozil’s fortunes, brought up his idea of ‘a party member survey’.
The problems, of course, run much, much deeper than venal party officials who try to re-arrange the chairs on the proverbial deck of the Titanic-known-as-SPÖ:
An anecdote to begin with: in 2015, during the so-called ‘Migration Crisis’, my brother-in-law was one of the young police officers detached to the Austrian-Hungarian border. There was chaos; when the officers on the spot called the Viennese ministries, no one picked up the phone. At least Hans-Peter Dozkozil, then serving as State Police Commandant (Landespolizeiinspektor) made a trip to the border and signalled at least a little bit of support from ‘politics’.
Alexander Surowiec reported on how serious Doskozil was about this earlier this year in Fass ohne Boden:
A gloomy report from 2015 entitled ‘Concept for Comprehensive Border Control’ to the Ministry of the Interior proves that ‘area-wide border controls were impossible’. The Ministry of the Interior capitulated at the time. The document was signed by the former State Police Commandant and current Governor of the Burgenland, Hans-Peter Doskozil (SPÖ). As a reminder: in 2015, Johanna Mikl-Leitner (ÖVP) was Minister of the Interior, now Governor of Lower Austria. And the contents of the report are quite something. The concept describes the apocalyptic conditions in detail. Especially explosive: the report was deliberately withheld from the population.
In short: the Burgenland police, for which Doskozil was responsible at the time, was overwhelmed. The (sic) Ministry of the Interior, led at the time by Mikl-Leitner, assumed the ostrich position, and the Austrian Armed Forces were—and still are—unable to protect the country’s borders after decades of ‘efficiency increases’ led by ÖVP and SPÖ defence ministers.
The entire report from October 2015, which has been withheld from the public until now, can be found on the homepage of Fass ohne Boden.
Anyone who is still surprised that Doskozil has not taken a clearer position that he’d like to assume the chairmanship of the SPÖ after reading it cannot be helped.
Vote SPÖ, you’ll get Evidence-Free Tyranny
But that’s not all, because the ‘Viennese Way’ of harsh but epidemiologically useless measures (compulsory masks in public transport until 28 Feb. 2023) is the great achievement of the SPÖ in relation to all matters Covid. Whenever the federal government was miles ‘off the reservation’ with its policies, ‘Concerned Branch Covidians’ Michael Ludwig (mayor of Vienna) and Health and Human Services Secretary of State Peter Hacker—both are quite obese, by the way—were at the forefront of adding a conspicuous otherworldliness to it.
Like Ludwig and Hacker in Vienna, by the way, so was (is) Pamela Rendi-Wagner, currently serving as embattled SPÖ Chairwoman at the federal level. If there was a significant difference between the ill-conceived and ill-advised federal mandates, it was that the SPÖ demanded even tougher—and more useless and evidence-free—mandates than the federal government did.
As a reminder: in the below video, you can observe Vice Chancellor and Soft Humanitarian (/sarcasm) Werner Kogler of thre Greens insulting the anti-mandate protesters—in parliament, no less—as ‘fascists’ and then some (German ‘only’):
What Legacy Media Doesn’t report On
The question before us is this, then: guess what no-one in legacy media is doing? Asking the far more significant questions pertaining to the documented links (via joint projects, conference participations paid for in part by Big Pharma, joint publications) between Rendi-Wagner, a trained physician, the Austrian Society for Tropical Medicine (ÖGIT) and the National Immunisation Consortium (Nationales Impfgremium).
As I documented a while ago, virtually all medically or scientifically credentialed individuals of the National Immunisation Consortium have these above-mentioned ties to the Austrian Society of Tropical Medicine = next to the federal gov’t, these people were the most vocal shills of Big Pharma:
So, here’s my explanation for this legacy media blackout: massive conflicts of interest between these individuals and the (semi) public institutions they are part of.
So, there’s no doubt on my mind as to why nobody in legacy media—or in the SPÖ, for that matter—takes issue with these shenanigans.
I am hardly surprised in view of the desolate state of the party, its results in Lower Austria and the upcoming state election in Salzburg.
No sane person would want Rendi-Wagner’s post when the chances of victory are that slim.
Moreover, as Peter Hacker recently stated—lied—about: his and the SPÖ’s support for the ill-guided injection mandate happened ‘against their convictions’. Yep, you read that correctly: Mr. Hacker, one of the architects of Vienna’s extra-harsh and useless mandates, who once called the injection mandate as ‘without alternatives’ (alternativlos) now tells the public that he’s never been truly in support of it.
Here’s one of the things Mr. Hacker signed off on as late as last autumn/winter:
For background and further particulars, please see the below-linked piece:
Bottom Lines
Social Democracy—and the other systemic parties—have not been in their death throes since last weekend.
No one wants to look back, as Health Minister Johannes Rauch (Greens) recently noted, without irony or introspection, but with amazing amounts of delusion:
I also don't see the need to reconcile with people who question science or deny facts.
If we want to judge Mr. Rauch by his words, what about data on the ‘vaccination’ of pregnant women?
Speaking of ‘vaccination’, how about talking openly about the problems of immune escape?
By the way, the latest evidence thereof—via a preprint in the New England Journal of Medicine—shows again how this is being done in a more than shady way: any evidence about the ‘efficacy’ (sic) of these injections is ‘measured’ in relation to people who have already been ‘vaccinated’; this means that no statements whatsoever can be made about its ‘efficacy’ in general as there’s no control group (my emphasis):
Persons who received either one or two monovalent Covid-19 vaccine boosters had much lower neutralization activity against omicron subvariants (especially against BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB, which contain the predicted escape mutation R346T) than that against the WA1/2020 strain. Persons who received the BA.5-containing bivalent booster had better neutralizing activity against all omicron subvariants (especially against BA.2.75.2, BQ.1.1, and XBB) than those who received either one or two monovalent boosters, even though the neutralization GMT against WA1/2020 was similar in the cohort that received the two monovalent boosters and the cohort that received the bivalent booster. These responses are consistent with recent observations in persons with breakthrough omicron infection showing broadened neutralizing activity against omicron subvariants. Limitations of this study include the small cohort size, differences in age among the cohorts, the unknown effect of previous exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and comparison of the vaccines at a single time point. These serologic data show an overall neutralization benefit with bivalent booster immunizations.
Heute, on the other hand, presented the above-related ‘study’ the other way round, claiming high levels of efficacy vs. currently-circulating variants. If, hypothetically, you’d now take Mr. Rauch’s above-related statement at face-value…
Ms. Rendi-Wagner, on the other hand, did not say anything about all of this one way or the other, although as a physician she could probably say something (but probably does not want to because of the interconnections mentioned…).
‘Leadership’ qualities at work, you know.
As recent developments at the EU level indicate—‘the EU Commission wants to change Europe from peacetime to wartime’, as Der Spiegel reports—a return to the positions advocated by Helmut Schmidt, Olof Palme, or Bruno Kreisky, among others, seems more than necessary. It’s also why it won’t happen.
Neither in Austria nor elsewhere.
Neither Ms. Rendi-Wagner nor Mr. Doskozil ‘in charge’ are suggestive of any change of course, to say nothing about Mr. Ludwig or Mr. Hacker.
The SPÖ is dead, but like the proverbial ‘headless chicken’, the once mighty and stately party is still running around for a bit longer.
Soon, however, that will be the end of it.