Respectability Over Everything?

Was the optimism of the last year and a half ever justified? Babler, who was for many years the mayor of Traiskirchen, a town in the suburbs south of Vienna, had long attracted media attention due to his exceptionally left-wing positions. In areas as wide-ranging as economic and social policy and migration and refugee issues, he was a genuine left-wing outlier in the SPÖ, which like many Western European social democratic parties has been undergoing a decades-long process of bureaucratic ossification and neoliberalization. Besides policy, Babler’s refreshingly direct, human, and approachable personality and his emphasis on his own proletarian background contributed to his authentic image.

Even just a few years ago, he still called himself a Marxist. Here was a beacon of hope for Austrian leftists who still hoped or believed that the SPÖ could turn from a neoliberal technocratic party back into a genuine left-wing workers’ party. It is no wonder his campaign for party leadership led to a wave of new members joining the SPÖ, which had seen its membership in decline for decades. Thousands of left-wingers who had long since given up hope in the Social Democrats, or who previously doubted the party could be a vehicle for a revitalized left, now joined it in a real wave of enthusiasm.

Just a year and a half ago it seemed like a miracle was happening: Babler — a Marxist small-town mayor and trained machine fitter — prevailed against the party establishment, triumphing over both the centrist former party leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner and her most promising challenger, Hans Peter Doskozil, the governor of the Austrian state of Burgenland, who flirted with anti-immigration positions. On June 6, 2023, Babler officially stepped into party leadership.

But the honeymoon soon came to an end. Enthusiasm for Babler began to crumble when confronted with the reality of party politics. Even before his election, and even more so after it, Babler found himself under attack from all sides. The bourgeois mainstream media furiously denounced Babler as a crypto-Stalinist and authoritarian because of his youthful Marxist political orientation. How could someone like this, they claimed, be the right person for reasonable, responsible citizens to entrust with the fate of the country?

The reception Babler received from many of his own party “comrades” was hardly better. Internal hostility was more subtle, but the SPÖ party establishment was caught off guard by Babler’s victory, and many undoubtedly feared that the victory of the long-irrelevant left-wing party faction could endanger their established liberal economic program and electoral appeal among the urban middle classes. They also worried about the stability of their own factions’ established patronage networks within the party establishment.

The powerful Viennese state party association and the Tyrolean SPÖ leadership were particularly cold in their reception of Babler. Doris Bures, representing the Viennese SPÖ bureaucracy, mockingly referred to Babler’s left-reformist economic program as “suspect,” and the Tyrolean SPÖ leader Georg Dornauer publicly stated in August that Babler’s promise of a thirty-two-hour week was nothing but an economically damaging utopian dream, adding in a somewhat threatening tone that he had to “assume that Babler is no longer pursuing the thirty-two-hour week.”

The challenge that Babler faced was clear: simply becoming leader as a left-winger will not automatically or fundamentally change the character of the party. Especially if this leader faces an immovable party bureaucracy and also intends to join coalition governments, since maintaining internal party coherence and an image of external respectability and “acceptability” to potential coalition partners and the media are nonnegotiable.

The desire to fit into the straitjacket of bourgeois respectability (to be “business-friendly” above all) has already considerably constrained the rebel Babler. Der Standard, the most important newspaper of the liberal Austrian bourgeoisie, wrote appreciatively that

Andreas Babler has changed since the national elections. When he appears before the press these days, he speaks calmly, much more slowly than before, with few emotions, no more open talk of class warfare. The new SPÖ leader now uses words like “constructive” and speaks of a coalition that “must be defined from the center.”

Babler has also started wearing ties. This subtle sartorial change is emblematic of his strategic political transformation: from revolutionary to “statesman.” In his new form as a true statesman, Babler avoids potentially polarizing topics altogether or addresses them using conciliatory centrist language. For months, Babler said nothing about the Gaza war or the Austrian government’s support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, until eventually coming out with a rather weak appeal for a cease-fire. When the Vorarlberg state party began expulsion procedures against the leadership of the Socialist Youth (SJ) following a media firestorm over the group’s Palestine solidarity action, the party leader refrained from commenting.

Early in his tenure as leader in June 2023, Babler even welcomed further arms deliveries from the European Union to Ukraine. For this, he received words of appreciation from the liberal press, but it elicited many more horrified reactions from veteran left-wing Social Democrats — after all, Austria is a state constitutionally committed to neutrality. There is, then, little evidence of a new revolutionary turnaround in the SPÖ under Babler.

Renewal or Retreat

The attitude of left-wing Austrians toward their Social Democratic Party has settled back into its usual pattern of melancholy, resignation, and hopelessness. The general picture is all the bleaker because the Communist Party (KPÖ), as a left-wing alternative to the SPÖ, has not benefited from the SPÖ’s weakness. In September’s election the KPÖ achieved its best nationwide election result since the 1960s with 2.4 percent of the vote, but it still fell well short of the 4 percent needed to enter parliament.

It is hard to say whether it will be able to maintain the momentum that it has been building over the past several years without the addition of a parliamentary faction. This momentum really began with the election of Elke Kahr as mayor of Graz, making her the only Communist mayor of a major Western European city in 2021, and continued with the spectacular performance of the KPÖ in the Salzburg state elections in 2023.

It was hoped that reaching 4 percent nationally would be the party’s next big achievement, but instead the trajectory is seeming to plateau. In the Styrian state elections in September, the KPÖ even suffered a major setback: only 4.5 percent of the vote compared to 6 percent in 2019. Unfortunately, Styria as a whole has not followed the lead of its capital, Graz.

Last year, I raised the concern that Babler-mania could reorient significant parts of the Austrian left to working within the SPÖ and indirectly hinder the growth of the KPÖ, all while failing to meaningfully pull the SPÖ to the left. Wind hindsight, it is not impossible to imagine that the KPÖ could have a presence in parliament right now, had the left wing of the SPÖ broken with the party for good and reoriented to working within the KPÖ, instead of hoping that Babler would miraculously reverse the party’s rightward drift.

Babler’s failings exemplify a dilemma facing all modern social democratic reformist projects, including recent efforts to reverse the decades-long technocratic-neoliberal turn of such parties.

During the golden era of Western European social democracy from the 1950s to the 1970s, exemplified by figures such as Bruno Kreisky in Austria and Willy Brandt in Germany, social democratic parties in major European nations were able to pursue wide-reaching social and economic reform policies. This was made possible by the rapid economic growth of the immediate postwar decades, which brought Western European capital such massive and seemingly ever-increasing profits that the ruling class could at least grudgingly accept significant wage increases for workers and the expansion of the welfare state as the price for maintaining social peace. Postwar Western European social democracy had such a loyal working-class electorate, often with entire social identities shaped by the party, that it could regularly form governments on its own or, at least, dominate coalitions as the senior partner. It could leverage these favorable economic conditions and its own powerful base to such a degree that it could demand considerable cooperation and concessions from bourgeois coalition partners.

Both these conditions are things of the past. The permanent crisis of Western European capitalism since 2008–9 has led to a radicalization of the political representatives of capital. Now they fight tooth-and-nail against even the smallest new progressive social reforms and dream of eliminating those that already exist by dismantling the welfare state, lengthening working hours, and reducing real earned incomes.

The era in which social democratic parties were omnipresent in the lives of European workers is over too. The disintegration of these parties is so advanced that single-party governments are no longer an option, and offers for participation in coalition governments with bourgeois parties are for the role of junior partner. If social democrats want any stake in government formation at all, more and more often they are made to beg and plead their way into coalitions with bourgeois conservatives by completely abandoning their avowed principles.

This dynamic only seems to worsen as the rapid rise of right-wing populism increasingly offers conservatives a more attractive alternative. Why bother with the remnants of reformist nonsense in parts of social democracy, when you can simply form a coalition with new right-wing radicals and ensure the uncompromising representation of the interests of the most reactionary sections of capital?

Increasingly, social democratic would-be reformists can only get into government by abandoning their reformist programs. We should dread to imagine the display of humiliation and self-abnegation that would await Babler’s SPÖ if it joined a coalition as the junior partner of Karl Nehammer’s right-wing ÖVP.

For all the past and seemingly inevitable future failings of traditional social democracy, the radical left in Austria has not broken through or found a strategy to halt the triumphal march of the Right. Yet now that the initial enthusiasm has faded, it should also be obvious that Babler’s effort to become a “respectable” and “governable” coalition partner for the traditional bourgeois right is not forging a path against the radical right, but merely alongside them.