SALZBURG: Austria’s Greens were set to approve a coalition deal with the conservatives led by Sebastian Kurz, applauding their leader’s argument that it would keep the far right out of power and provide a chance for climate-related tax reform.
The parties struck the deal on New Year’s Day, paving the way for Kurz to return to power three months after winning an election and for the left-wing environmentalists to enter government for the first time.
The awkward alliance is being closely watched in Germany, where the electoral balance is similar, at a time of growing calls for urgent action on climate change.
Many Greens have balked at elements of Kurz’s law-and-order agenda, despite their leader Werner Kogler saying the deal had to reflect their party’s smaller share of the vote. The Greens won 13.9 per cent to 37.5 per cent for Kurz’s OVP, whose last coalition was with the far right FPO.
Kogler told a Greens party congress - whose approval he needed to seal the coalition deal - that it “makes a difference” whether Kurz governed with the Greens or the FPO. The standing ovation and repeated applause that Kogler received left little doubt that delegates would back the deal in a vote later on Saturday.
Kurz has made a hard line on immigration and “political Islam” his trademark, and the deal includes extending a ban on headscarves in schools until the age of 14 from around 10 currently.
The OVP-FPO coalition collapsed in May when FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache was caught in a video sting offering to fix state contracts. A provisional government of civil servants has been in place since June.
The new coalition deal resurrects some of the previous Kurz government’s ideas, however, such as preventive custody for people deemed a threat to public safety, even if they have yet to commit a crime. That was proposed after a fatal stabbing this year apparently committed by an asylum seeker.
Many Greens have expressed misgivings about such measures, and the fact that their wish to overhaul taxation to better price in carbon emissions - the main factor in man-made global warming - has been put off until 2022.
“Will it succeed? What will happen in 2022? I don’t know yet either,” said Kogler. “But we will work on it and fight for it to move forward.”
Meanwhile, Austrian opposition parties and environmental groups had on Friday criticised a new coalition deal between conservatives and the Greens as heavy on the centre-right party’s law-and-order agenda while delaying urgently needed action on climate change.
Conservative leader Sebastian Kurz has touted his deal, which would reinstate him as chancellor and bring the left-wing Greens to power for the first time, as “the best of both worlds”, combining both parties’ core campaign pledges.
The awkward alliance between ideological adversaries is being watched closely in Europe, particularly in Germany where similar voting patterns might make it a potential model for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats after she retires.
“It is not the best of both worlds,” the leader of the Social Democrats, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, told a news conference about the deal between Kurz’s People’s Party (OVP) and the Greens. “It is far more an OVP manifesto with Green camouflage.”
Many Greens balked at the deal, which retained much of the hard line on immigration and “political Islam” seen under Kurz’s last coalition government with the far-right Freedom Party which collapsed in May. — Reuters
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