What's it like at the moment?
In
Austria, we'll soon have a legislative snap election (on 28 September '08). Since 2006, we've had a grand coalition between the two biggest parties - the ÖVP (Christian dems) and the SPÖ (social dems) - but it didn't work out.
From the
"Austrian legislative election 2008" Wiki page:
The election set a record for the largest amount of parties contesting the election nationally, with ten parties:
* Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ, social democratic)
* Austrian People's Party (ÖVP, Christian democratic)
* The Greens – The Green Alternative (GRÜNE, green)
* Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ, nationalist)
* Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ, nationalist)
* Liberal Forum (LIF, liberal)
* Citizens' Forum Austria (FRITZ, Christian socialist)
* Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ, communist)
* Save Austria (RETTÖ, eurosceptic)
* The Christians (DC, Christian conservative)
A survey on
this site shows the popularity of each party right now
Date: 05.09.08
Institute: gallup
SPÖ: 28%
ÖVP: 27%
GRÜ: 12%
FPÖ: 17%
BZÖ: 6%
FRI : 3%
LIF: 4%
KPÖ, RÖ, Chr, Others: 0 %
Those 17% of the FPÖ really bother me. Only today I noticed that the city was plastered with (really big) FPÖ and almost equally as many BZÖ posters, only here (in a part of the city where there are almost only immigrants like me) have I seen a whole of 2(!) SPÖ ads. BZÖ is actually a "fairly" young party, it's a split group of the FPÖ. As far as I remember they split because of "differences" (the BZÖ was a little to extreme for the FPÖ which decreased their chances of actually winning an election; notice the BZÖ's colour, kind of close to brown, heh?). Today I overheard a conversation between two "collegues" of mine, they were talking about voting for the FPÖ because they liked
Strache (leader of the FPÖ) for some reason...I thought that was pretty inconsiderate since 50% of our class aren't Austrians. What makes it even sadder is that they obviously only want to vote blue because the grand coalition sucked...well, yeah, but you can still vote green or red or black, doesn't mean it will be a grand coalition again, just please don't vote for the Nazis because that coalition sucked