Austrian election: How to win the marketing professional

The result of the elections to the National Council teaches one thing above all: Austrians are reluctant to lecture. A good 57 percent of the votes were in the 2017 general election on the conservative ÖVP and the right-wing party FPÖ omitted. Two years and various scandals later, it is hardly less: The two ex-government parties now come together to almost 56 percent - a minus of less than two percent.

The Ibiza video, published in May by SPIEGEL and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, has shaken the foundations of the republic, but not the majority of voters. Only the preferences within the center-right camp have been postponed.

Robust against advice

In resistance to advice from the rest of the world, Austrians are traditionally robust. They proved this in the eighties during the affair of President Kurt Waldheim's Wehrmacht past; and they proved it during the EU sanctions against the ÖVP-FPÖ government under Wolfgang Schüssel in the year 2000. Under fire they move together between Karwendel and Karawanken.

Austrians lived in a country with a highly developed culture of adulteration, according to respected publicist Anneliese Rohrer - one is good at offending others.

But that does not mean that you can put up with everything yourself. Above all, the supporters of the ÖVP made that clear on Sunday - their critics abroad, but also in Germany.

Rarely has the gap been deeper in Austria between published opinion and voter behavior. As a rogue populist, as unclothed and as power-infested stirrup holder of the FPÖ Sebastian Kurz has recently been described in comments and branding speeches. A sworn community of renowned Twitterers encouraged each other mutually in this view - perhaps because Gesinnungsgenossenschaft warms the heart, as the Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein mocked recently in an essay: "Again the ball into the empty gate, again everything done right."

At the same time, liberal discourse and voter reality are increasingly falling apart. The phenomenon of parallel political worlds has made possible a president like Donald Trump in the US and made the AfD dangerous in Germany. In Austria decades ago, the gifted demagogue Jörg Haider demonstrated the art of successfully positioning himself as the mouthpiece of the common man against allegedly unrealistic elites.

Just a banana republic

The marketing professional Sebastian Kurz has managed to put his stamp on an extremely personalized election campaign. The memory that Austria had just embarrassed itself as a banana republic in the eyes of many, thereby faded.

The fact that Kurz, not least with selfies via Instagram and statesmanlike pose in TV duels, reached far more voters than his political competitors, says a lot about the secrets of campaigning success in the digital age.

On the other hand, the Greens managed to increase their election result by more than threefold, with emphatically left-wing positions in social policy and favored by the tailwind of the current climate debate. This leads to the conclusion that the content format can pay off as well.

Also in Austria are the topics. Only in the question, which was important this time, a silent majority decided differently than a strong opinion minority would have liked: The Ibiza video and the following affairs, they harmed the FPÖ - but not the old and presumably new Chancellor Kurz ,