Special Reports

On the afternoon of 11 Feb. 2009, Mike Brennan stepped out of the underground at Vienna’s Spittelau station.

May 1999
Markus Omofuma

The 25-year-old Nigerian suffocates after being bound and gagged by Austrian immigration police on a deportation flight to Sofia, Bulgaria, a procedure that investigations later reveal was common. The three police officers responsible receive suspended sentences for causing death through negligence. They are allowed to continue in service.

Franz Nauschnigg

With Europe in crisis, Austria can count itself lucky. The country has outperformed the rest of the European Union in these economic hard times. The recession of 2009 was not as deep – Austria’s economy shrank by 3.9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), compared to the EU average of -4.2%. And Austria’s return to growth was faster and stronger than in the rest of the EU, marking 2% of GDP in 2010 against the EU average of 1.8%.

With every day’s news, Wolfgang Radlegger was getting more and more frustrated: the Euro crisis, underfunded universities, misguided immigration policy, rampant corruption – the list of pressing issues was getting longer and longer and public decision-making ever more paralysed.

On 14 Oct., a Friday evening, there was not a single spare seat in the council chamber of the Austrian Parliament. But it wasn’t politicians. Instead-, the chamber was occupied by a very mixed public audience – ranging from elegantly coiffed society ladies to flat-capped young hipsters.

“If philosophers are being consulted, the crisis must be deep indeed,” Konrad Paul Liessmann, professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, quipped in the packed glass-roofed courtyard of the Haus der Musik. It didn’t need explaining that the crisis in question was that of Austrian politics, engulfed in burgeoning corruption scandals; indeed, Der Standard, an Austrian daily, found it sufficient to entitle its panel discussion that Sept. 19 – the first in a series of “Monday Talks” (“Montagsgespräche”) – “The State of Austrian Politics: Philosophers take position”. Everybody knew. 

Four-hundred pages was the length of the report issued by forensic experts in August this year, identifying the extent of dubious payments and contracts conducted by Telekom Austria, the country’s largest telecom provider and a former public utility that is still 28 per cent state-owned.

“It went up brick by brick” said a blonde woman, her eyes red as she recalled the scene she witnessed as a little girl fifty years ago. “From time to time, the people on the other side waved to us.” She stops and stares down Bernauer Strasse.

It was one of those rare moments in politics. Ecological concerns were pitted against big business and for once at least the environment won.