This video is an explanation of the current state of austrian politics. I go over everything that happend between 2016 and today. There where snap elections, impeachment and high treason. The entire story is a warning against giving power to conservatives or the far right. I cover the austrian 2016 presidential election, the 2017 general election and the 2019 general election both of which where snap elections. Discord: https://discord.gg/77HQJXQ Transcript: The state of Austrian politics (it’s interesting I swear) Hello everybody. Today I am gonna tell you a little about the state of Austrian Politics, not because you care or because it affects you but because it is kind of amazing. I made a video like that before, but I had half of the subscribers at the time and thing changed, so I’ll go over everything again. The Players Let’s start with our players. Our story begins in 2016. There are 4 parties we care about in our story. There is the far right anti-immigration, pro-free market FPÖ, they are usually portrayed as blue so I’ll use that instead of the name. The social democratic SPÖ, sort of like the British labour party or Bernie Sanders if you are American. Then there is the Conservative ÖVP. They are sort of like the moderate ones of the American democrats or the British Tories. Then there is the green party. They are like the SPÖ but they prioritize nature as well. In Austria we have a direct proportional election system so if a party wins 20% of the votes it get’s 20% of the seats in parliament. There is no local constituency stuff like in the UK and no electoral college like in the US. When no party has 51% of the seats there must be a coalition. That’s when 2 parties decide to work together to help each other achieve their goals. This usually involves a lot of compromises because no 2 parties agree on everything. The government is led by the councillor, usually the head of the largest party. There is a president as well but he doesn’t do much except in extreme national emergencies like when the coalition breaks, the vice councillor steps down and the councillor is impeached at the same time or something like that. But what are the odds of that? So now that we know how those things work we can get into what happened. At the start of our story it was 2016 and it was time to elect a new president. To become president one candidate needs to get 50% of the vote. If no candidate get’s that much in the first round there is a second election with just the 2 top contenders to decide who it will be. All of the parties had their candidates run. The social democrats and the conservatives both only got 11% of the vote which was a heavy blow to both of them. 19% went to Irmgard Griss, an independent candidate who previously served on the supreme court. She is who I voted for in the first round. Fun fact: The election in 2016 was the first election I was allowed to take part in since in Austria you can vote from the age of 16. Believe it or not the 1999 in my username is the year of my birth. Anyways Griss wasn’t one of the 2 main candidates and later joined the NEOS. A 100% neoliberal party that tried to present itself as a new alternative to the established parties so that’s a yikes. The green party candidate got 21% and the far right candidate got 35%. This means that there was a second round and the green candidate won. Barely. By 0.35% of the electorate. Then the far right party went in front of the high court and wanted to repeat the election because there had been irregularities when counting the votes. They won that case, the election was done again and the green party won again this time by almost 4%. So the president is from the green party. Remember that it’ll be important later. At the same time parliament looked like this. There was a red and black coalition with a red councillor. In 2017 conservatives had a bit of a leadership struggle for a few months and eventually this guy won. As you can see he is pretty young and he used that astatic to gain popularity. When he took over the leadership of his party, he decided that he couldn’t continue to work with the social democrats and ended the government. That led to a snap election in which he won a great deal of seats. The conservative party now was the biggest force in the parliament at 30% of the vote. The red and blue each got 26%. This was the first election after the refugee crisis and the far right used that to gain seats. At the same time there was a leadership struggle in the green party which led to one of their members named PILZ running on his own. Surprisingly he managed to get enough votes to gain a seat in parliament while the green party didn’t. The coalition that came out of that was a conservative plus far right government which didn’t surprise me. Right after the election was called, long before the first polls came out I made a Youtube video in which I predicted that this would be the result.

• published: 15 Dec 2019
• views: 12600