The End of Covidistan, pt. 6: Revenge of the Voters, Groundhog Day Edition
Special Feature: Zero Covid Hawks are now 'Colourblind' (and so are at least 11% of the electorate)
This is an occasional series, for the first five parts, please see here.
There was another state-level election on 23 April 2023, on which see here for the ‘Ministry of Truth’ version. Long story short: the governing coalition led by conservative-in-name-only Wilfried Haslauer (ÖVP; his very junior partners incl. the libertarian-wokefied NEOS and the Greens) lost badly—the ÖVP lost close to 8%, the NEOS are no longer in the state parliament, and the Greens lost, too.
Of course, Mr. Haslauer was among the ÖVP firebrands who, back in that infamous autumn 2021, advocated strongly in favour of forced Covid injections, much like his fellow party hack Johanna Mikl-Leitner, one of the ÖVP’s senior leaders. When asked about it earlier this year while campaigning, he tried to distance himself from his former self. Let’s see how this flip-flopping stance worked with (on) the voters, shall we?
‘The Lower Vaxx Uptake, the Stronger the FPÖ’
This, of course, didn’t go over very well with (some of) the voters, as retired mathematics professor Erich Neuwirth (U Vienna) was quick to point out:
There is a quite strong correlation between the Covid injection rate and (vs.) the gains made by the mandate-critical Freedom Party.
This factoid didn’t escape legacy media, with tabloid Österreich even headlining an article in the following way: ‘The Lower Vaxx Uptake, The Stronger the FPÖ’ (translation and emphases mine):
It is striking that the Freedom Party made significantly stronger gains in municipalities with low vaccination rates than in others. This was also the case in the regional elections in Lower Austria and most recently in Carinthia…
Yet, all matters Covid played no central role in the Salzburg election…
In five municipalities the [Freedom] Party received more than 40%, in 44 municipalities more than 30% of the vote. The FPÖ municipality with the highest share of voters was Werfenweng with 43.45% (+8.7%). The largest increase for the Freedom Party was in Sankt Koloman with +21.25%, where they achieved 39%. And in only one municipality—Weißpriach—did the FPÖ lose votes (-1.21, down to 26.11%).
Helpfully, state broadcaster ORF offers a good illustration of these large-scale swings:
The bottom line of the agit-prop pumped out by state and de facto state broadcasters is this: Covid played no role in the campaign, hence we don’t need to talk about it. If there were large, if not unprecedented since 1945, swings in the electorate, the reason for voters doing that would, of course, be because these are ‘deplorables’ (Hillary Clinton) who live outside the progressive and wokefied ‘centres’.
A Second Glance: Voters Remember—and Punish the Gov’t
As the bird dropping by prof. Neuwirth already indicated, there’s a little bit more than meets the eye to this.
Care for any particulars? Well, let’s start with the municipality of St. Koloman, which resides at the top of the above illustration about FPÖ gains. Here’s the proximate reason why the electorate voted the way they did, as per ORF, dated 18 Oct. 2021 (my translation and emphases):
The Coronavirus traffic light is flashing bright red in Salzburg, which brings harsher mandates again. The Tennengau municipality of St. Koloman will be quarantined for a fortnight from 18 October with exit controls [that meant: roadblocks at the roads leading out of the municipality]
Salzburg’s Deputy Secretary of Health Christian Stöckl of the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) comments: ‘We will quarantine St. Koloman for 14 days from Monday. That means imposing traffic restrictions that will be strictly controlled by the police. The 2.5 G rules will apply there. So fully vaccinated, recovered or PCR-tested to be able to leave.’
Everyone else was confined to their homes, with law enforcement—what a sick joke—posted at the outskirts of the town. (I’ll leave aside the absurdity of people back then pushing the farcical ‘fully vaccinated’ sham.)
Personal comment: I read this back in autumn 2021, that is, at the time when I started this Stubstack, in part as a form of auto-therapy to deal with these events. I recall a conversation with my wife, which went a bit like this: ‘can you imagine? I mean, it’s the functional equivalent of checkpoints on trunk roads, with armed police or military asking for papers every time you would like to pass—how would you try to explain this to your children in the back of the car?’
Moving on, let’s see if that was an outlier, shall we? As ‘older’ legacy media reports indicate, it would appear that people whose communities were ‘quarantined’ in spring 2020, also remembered.
As did the people in those municipalities where injection uptake was comparatively low to begin with. As reported by Salzburg24 (translation and emphases mine),
the FPÖ gains were stronger in municipalities with low Covid vaccination rates than in municipalities where the vaccination rate was higher. For the ÖVP, the opposite effect was noticeable: the People’s Party lost more in municipalities with low vaccination rates…
The Salzburger Nachrichten and [State Statistician Gernot] Filipp also looked at those eight municipalities where injection uptake was lowest among the over-twelve-year-olds at the peak of the Corona Delta wave in November 2021. At that time, the number of daily infections reached new highs, eventually leading to a renewed nationwide lockdown and the announcement of a general vaccination mandate. In all eight municipalities, the Freedom Party outperformed the People's Party yesterday: in St. Koloman [see!], Krispl, Scheffau, Muhr, St. Georgen, Bad Vigaun, Faistenau, and Kuchl. While the FPÖ gained 6.9% statewide…the ÖVP lost 7.4%, and some of these election results are well beyond these averages.
Correlation Between Covid Vaxx Rate and Election Results
According to Filipp, apart from the FPÖ and ÖVP……’attributing everything causally to vaccination is certainly too short-sighted, but there will certainly be a certain effect in Salzburg as well’, the statistician is quoted.
Bottom Lines
A could go on about this, but I think there’s two main take-aways:
Whenever given a ‘choice’ between the powers-that-be and any kind of ‘alternative’, a sizeable share of voters will go for the ‘up yours’ option.
At the same time, the FPÖ’s overall share—at the state levels and nationwide—hovers between 25-30%, which puts it firmly ahead of all other parties by a considerable margin.
We’ve never had such a situation in Austria since 1945. Yet, it’s important to remember that the FPÖ—in spite of its quite surprising salience in terms of anti-Covid mandate stance—is an at least partially systemic opposition party. By this it is meant that the approx. 25-30% of the electorate they may garner is about their ceiling as long as there is no substantial change, such as, e.g., a firm and credible UK Independence Party-like ‘exit from the EU/anti-NATO/WHO’ stance.
Sadly, I doubt that what I wrote about the FPÖ is very much, if at-all, different from the other partially systemic opposition parties elsewhere, such as the current Italian gov’t run by Meloni (who funnel arms to Ukraine), Le Pen’s faux anti-establishmentarian sentiments, or the Alternative für Deutschland, which steadfastly cooperates, by and large, with the self-destruction of a once-proud and self-respecting nation.
It’s all so very sad, but there’s nothing to be done—except for looking out for someone, really: anyone, who will pick up the mantle of ‘positive patriotism’ and care for the working people (‘fair deal’) on the national level as the one and only proven and plausible true alternative to the globalist letter-soup cabal?
Am still hoping for some kind of positive domino effect but very uncertain where the starting point could be, not many lights out there at the moment...
Anyways, would like to thank you for your great writing! It helps.
At least there is a protest vote and it’s being counted. Let’s see how far RFK Jr. gets in the US