History wrote in Austria the left-wing politician, Elke Car, as it was done the first communist mayor in the history of Graz.
Car last year, together with two close associates of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), allocated two-thirds of her salary to people in need. In total 168,000 euros 1,577 of its fellow citizens were supported, who could not afford to buy food or were forced to leave their home because they could no longer pay the rent. Proximity to citizens is a key reason why the town hall of Graz, Austria’s second most populous city with almost 300,000 inhabitants, has officially passed into its hands. with the city council made up of Communists, Social Democrats and Greens.
The success of the Communist Party of Austria in this otherwise conservative country did not come out of nowhere. “This is the culmination of a successful course of three decades”, says Manes Weiskircher, a political scientist at the University of Oslo who studied the party’s rise in Graz. He states that the party has long realized how important it is to improve the daily lives of citizens.
One bike for each child
The model for the Austrian communists was the comrades in Lille about 30 years ago, who made significant improvements in the housing issue. Then the Austrian communists went even further, creating one contact line for tenants in distress, claiming the purchase of real estate from the municipal authority, financially supporting tenants in legal disputes and generally always listening to their fellow human beings.
The new City Council of Communists, Greens and Social Democrats has many ambitious plans for Graz. Including wants to give a bike to every child in town handing out gift vouchers to families. So far, its height has not been determined. Besides, they want to to build real estate on behalf of the municipality and to reduce the financial contribution of families in primary kindergartens. According to the new mayor one of the first measures will be suspension of planned increases in municipal fees to the level of inflation for 2020 in order to relieve tenants. At the same time, they plan to increase the number of German language courses for immigrants.
“I am a little scared of the expectations that were cultivated”
Are conclusions drawn for the Left in general from the phenomenon of the Communist Party in Graz? Manes Weisskircher suggests to aspiring imitators to deal with the essence of the work and not to be limited to wooden and variegated slogans, gaps of content: “The current Left is often consumed in high-level debates among intellectuals and does not dare to deal with everyday issues, such as tenant protection laws.”, states the researcher adding that “What is required is not so much the impressive posters and the successful election campaigns, but also the credibility in the long run”.
The new mayor of Graz, however, makes it clear that she will not change the way of contact with the citizens. It promises to remain loyal to both its citizens and its political opponents. She says thousands of people have emailed her expressing joy at her election victory. “The expectations that were cultivated frighten me a little, but I was never afraid in my life”, underlines Elke Kar.
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