ÖVP and Greens cooperate again

By Lisa Chapman

Upper Austria to get an ÖVP-Green government again.
Opposition divided on agreement.

Linz. The ÖVP and the Greens have decided to form another coalition in Upper Austria, it was revealed on Thursday. ÖVP Governor Josef Pühringer and Green provincial environmental councillor Rudi Anschober announced the news after the executive committees of their respective parties had approved the arrangement.

It will be only the second ÖVP-Green coalition on federal or provincial level in Austria. The first was also formed in Upper Austria from 2003 to 2009.

Greens’ federal head Eva Glawischnig said she was pleased by the news, calling the coalition "a guarantee” that Austria’s "energy turnaround” would continue. BZÖ provincial spokesman Rainer Widmann however described it as "full-steam back into the past” and called for "cont- rols on subsidised apartments to prevent migrants from turning urban areas into ghettos.”

New Upper Austrian SPÖ leader Josef Ackerl said: "The ÖVP would rather play the green card than the red one” but said he was not overly disappointed about the exclusion of his party from the provincial coalition. But Ackerl said he was disappointed by his party’s loss of the housing portfolio in the provincial government. He called the decision "a political act that was not exactly friendly.”

The government’s future work, he added, would take place "in a spirit of agreed- upon cooperation,” and the SPÖ and the ÖVP would meet monthly in a coordination body. Ackerl said there would be a provincial party day on 28 November at which discussion of structural reform of the provincial SPÖ would begin.

He said the 27 September provincial election that had been a catastrophe for the SPÖ had "destroyed the dreams and hopes of a lifetime.” The party had to reform itself in order to be able to appeal to people again, he added.

Ackerl succeeded Erich Haider as Upper Austrian SPÖ leader after he resigned shortly after the provincial election in which the party suffered a loss of 13.4 percentage points, receiving just 24.94 per cent of the vote.

The SPÖ had not seen a sharper fall in votes in a provincial election since World War Two. The ÖVP garnered 46.8 per cent of the vote, up 3.4 percentage points from six years ago. The FPÖ came close to doubling its vote by receiving 15.3 per cent, up by 6.9 percentage points. The Greens received 9.2 per cent, up 0.1 of a percentage point, while the BZÖ - who campaigned with Jörg Haider’s sister Ursula Haubner as their front runner - failed to enter the provincial parliament. The party, which was founded in 2005, received just 2.83 per cent of the vote.

Printausgabe vom 22.10.2009