PicoZ

Skiers at Innsbruck and St. Anton tied their skis together with rubber binders that boosted Dr. Josef Klaus for Chancellor. In Vienna, shoppers were assaulted by Technicolored posters plumping for “Pittermann, Always a Democrat, Always for Austria!”, and others found their mailboxes stuffed with pamphlets showing Dr. Bruno Pittermann fondling his black cat Petzi. Even the revelers at the huge Vienna Staatsoper Fasching ball could not escape a host of beaming candidates. Austria was in the midst of a bitterly contested election campaign.

The campaign is the most heated in many years, largely because Austria has long endured a type of politics that is no contest at all. Ever since World War II, the conservative People’s Party and the Socialists, each with approximately half of the votes, have remained locked in a perpetual “Red-Black” coalition, reluctantly forced to get along with one another to keep the government going. Now, Conservative Chancellor Klaus is campaigning against his own Vice Chancellor, the Socialists’ Pittermann, and much of the repressed criticism of the past is coming out in a way that would not have surprised Vienna’s own Dr. Freud.

Mixed Angst. When Austria’s 4,500,000 voters go to the polls on March 6, they could give the politicians a still bigger surprise by upsetting the coalition balance. Last month the Austrian Communist Party for the first time urged its 100,000 supporters to vote Socialist. Their votes could give the Socialists a majority in the 165-member Parliament (the Socialists now have 76 seats to the conservatives’ 81), but in practice the People’s Party is far more likely to benefit. Austrians are well aware of how much bluer the Danube is on their side of the Iron Curtain. Making the most of their fears, Klaus’s campaign posters thunder about “the proof in black and white of the Red Volksfront menace.” For good measure, some campaign managers have spread the news by Mund’funk (word of mouth) that the two Red parties are planning a putsch.

The Socialists, in turn, have publicly accused the People’s Party of black schemes to permit the return of Otto Habsburg, pretender to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and restore to him part of the family’s nationalized fortunes. The Socialists have vehemently blocked Otto’s reentry, to the vast relief of a great many Austrians who recall the empire with a vivid mixture of nostalgia and Angst. So powerful an issue is the long-dead monarchy that the campaign has even been enlivened by a Dusseldorf human-relations counselor, Dr. Theodor Rudolf Pachmann, who last month petitioned for recognition as the only legitimate heir of Emperor Franz Josef. His ground: that his father was born in 1883 to a secret marriage between a Tuscan princess and Crown Prince Rudolf.

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