{"id":364,"date":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2017\/10\/17\/post-357-young-metternich\/"},"modified":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2017-10-17T00:00:00","slug":"post-357-young-metternich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2017\/10\/17\/post-357-young-metternich\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-357: Young Metternich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Austria’s 2017 general election has come and gone, following Germany’s a month ago. The key issue in both elections was the 2015-2016 Migrant Crisis, disgruntlement over which appears to have energized large numbers and shifted the political discourse to the right; turnout was high. In Austria’s case, parties of the right will have over two-thirds of the seats in the new legislature, and that is with proportional representation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The age of the new Austrian Chancellor has been the main coverage of the election I have seen. It is amazing, actually, that he is so young. The German press has called this character a ‘Young Metternich’<\/strong> ever since he became Foreign Minister, at age 27, a few years ago. He is now 31.<\/p>\n

\n\n\n\n
\n\n
\n

Sebastian Kurz <\/span><\/strong>(b. 1986), is Austria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs [Dec. 2013 to Present], and Head of the Austrian People’s Party (OVP) from mid 2017. His party will control 34% of seats in the legislature as the largest party, and Kurz will soon be Chancellor, the youngest head of government in the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"Picture\"<\/a> <\/p>\n
Sebastian Kurz<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n

The original Metternich <\/strong><\/span>(1773-1859) is characterized as a political genius who dominated Austrian politics from the 1810s to the 1840s, starting, as Kurz has, as Foreign Minister.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Metternich’s great achievement is the preservation of Austrian power. At that time, Austria was a true power, a major power, but could have disappeared after the Napoleonic disruption. Metternich gave the Austrian Empire another century of life, for better of worse. The Austria of that era was a multi-national, pan-central-European empire with a German ruling minority and a long-established royal family (the Hapsburgs). It era represented a Catholic, multi-ethnic, ‘multicultural’ alternative model to north-German Protestant ‘Prussianism’ based in Berlin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n

(Having long since lost the struggle against Berlin, Austrian\/Hapsburg power ended forever in 1918, after the loss of legitimacy caused by its poor performance in the war and an embarrassing-and-obvious dependence on Germany from summer 1914 onward (actually earlier). With Vienna discredited and totally unable to suppress ethnic secession movements, the pan-central-European ‘Austria’ fell apart and this new German-Austria, as we know it today, was born.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/div>\n
\n
 <\/div>\n
\n
 <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n

The ‘Young Metternich’ appellation for Kurz doesn’t make much sense, to me. The Austria of today is, unlike its imperial predecessor namesake, a very small state (7.5 million citizens in a Europe of 750 million). Also critically for this comparison, modern Austria is, by tradition, not<\/em> a player in international politics. It is not now and never has been a NATO member, and, for a Western country, was quite a late entrant into the EU (1995, about forty years late).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n

Kurz and Metternich might be compared in broader terms. Metternich is credited not just with preserving\/restoring Austrian power after the Napoleonic crisis, but with being a\/the central figure in doing the same for the whole of Europe’s quasi-aristocratic order which was seriously threatened, discredited, and injured during Napoleonic period. A lot of ‘centrists’ around today’s Europe dream of a figure to play this role of defending the European post-1945 order of social-democractic liberal democracy in a time it is (widely believed to be) “under threat.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n
\n

Skeptics would say that Kurz is not such a figure, even discounting the small size and disengagement of Austria, as he led his party to a 7.5% popular vote gain using, many have said, a watered-down version of the rhetoric of the insurgent Austrian Freedom Party (FPO). The latter is a party of the populist-nationalist right, whose campaign was based on slogans like “Stop the Islamization of Austria.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/div>\n
\n
\"Picture\"<\/a> <\/p>\n
“A new style. It’s time.”<\/div>\n
 <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\"Picture\"<\/a> <\/p>\n
 <\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Who will be Kurz’s coalition partner? <\/p>\n

He can form a ‘coalition of the Center’ with the Social Democrats (SPO), or he can rule in a right-wing coalition with the FPO. If the latter coalition governs, Austria will seem to have entered the ‘Viktor Orban’ Wing of European politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Austria’s 2017 general election has come and gone, following Germany’s a month ago. The key issue in both elections was the 2015-2016 Migrant Crisis, disgruntlement over which appears to have energized large numbers and shifted the political discourse to the right; turnout was high. In Austria’s case, parties of the right will have over two-thirds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}