Tipping the Balance Scale? Rightward Momentum, Party Agency and Austrian Party Politics

Abstract

Austrian mainstream parties perpetuated one of the longest standing grand coalition governments across Western Europe. Over at least two decades, the balance of power had shifted firmly toward the ideological right. The post-war Austrian party system has lacked viable centre parties and has failed to produce a green party on the scale of importance of those of many of its West European neighbours. It does not have workers parties apart from the mainstream Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ). The lack of depth or options for coalition-building on the political left in the Austrian party system has produced unique opportunities for coalition governments on the right in the early twenty-first century. Yet, Austrian parties on the right proved seemingly unable to capitalize upon such opportunities in order to entrench a right of centre bloc of power. Despite the break with grand coalition government in 1999 to form the coalition government between the Austrian People's Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP) and the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), the ÖVP–SPÖ government made a rather non-triumphant return in 2006 and again through snap elections of 2008. This article explores the difficulties encountered by parties in their attempts to capitalize upon the potential for sustaining a right power bloc by examining the strategic alignments and interaction between Austria's parties from1990–2012. It considers the trajectory of the parties electorally and in public office or opposition, examining the context and strategies employed at various points and especially as fortunes change. It argues that the Austrian far right traded the goal of policy for that of votes and later office, all the while becoming more domesticated and vulnerable to co-optation when in office. This led to party splits and some measure of party decline. Meanwhile, other parties including the ÖVP have suffered from an identity crisis adapting slowly to the rise of the FPÖ through the 1990s making strategic changes in the most recent decade to try and confront the FPÖ more directly.