Felix Stalder on Tue, 24 May 2016 17:46:33 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> alex van der bellen wins austrian presidentials!!! |
On 2016-05-23 16:35, Alex Foti wrote: > european xenophobia defeated again after fn was beaten in france > plus the winner's a green;) It was an amazing moment, yesterday afternoon. Public life screeched to halt, everyone was glued to their TV sets, computers, mobile phones. All major newspaper websites were down due to traffic overload while the public broadcaster was showing a Bavarian soap opera from the 1980s as the announcement of the final results was delayed, and delayed again, for close to an hour. The situation veered between comically grotesque and conspiratorial, until the tension was released into many spontaneous festivities. It was once again a collective effort lead by civil society to defeat the far-right. Political parties, other than the directly-involved Greens and the FPÖ, were notably absent, and the main effort of mobilization and carried out by lots of local initiatives, social media campaigns and so on. So, the post-war, anti-fascist consensus still holds, but barely, and seen as a historical tendency, the picture is not pretty. The far-fight in Austria is openly far-right, very close to Orban with everything you can imagine, including questioning borders established after World War One (South Tyrolia) or not supporting the celebration of May 8, as the end of World War Two (for the far-right, the "tragic events" ended only in 1955, when allied forces withdrew from Austria). The demographics of the elections where also very interesting. Cities voted center-left, country-side voted far-right, even though all the problems that the far-right is feeding on, are city-centered. Men without a high-school degree (Matura) voted overwhelmingly far-right, while women the same educational level were about evenly split. Men and women with higher education voted overwhelmingly center-left. I think there are multiple developments coming together. First, there are entire groups that see themselves as losers of an ongoing, historic transformation. Mainly male, white lower middle class, who see both their economic and their social status slip, vis-a-vis, in particular, women. Then, there is a second, more amorphous group which is probably not far-right, per se, but so disaffected by the current state of politics that they becoming increasingly willing to take the sledge-hammer to the political institutions. And only one willing to swing this hammer is the far-right. It was really sad to see how the far-right came out against TTIP, while the center-left, not only had to abandon its previous tactic agreement, but was dragging its feet to do so, even though it was clear that this would be a popular position. This, it seems, is a very similar mixture of what is fueling Donald Trump in the US. So, the vote, in my view, was one last vote of confidence for the political institutions's ability to reform themselves. This was helped by the fact that the previous chancellor, widely seen as the personification of stasis, had resigned the previous week. The Green candidate was very adamant that the refugee crises (and many others) needed an "European solutions" and the majority still agrees, even though none is forthcoming and nobody can even sketch a credible plan for one. If the European level cannot get their act together, then the rise of the far-right will continue. And in Austria, they stand at 49,7%. Felix -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: