Waldheim’s Shadow Looms Over Austrian Parliament Elections

An underlying theme in Austria’s current parliamentary election campaign is the need to improve the country’s international image, which took such a battering in last June’s presidential election.

The presidential campaign was marred by charges that candidate Kurt Waldheim was a war criminal. The former secretary general of the United Nations was elected, nevertheless, to the largely ceremonial post.

On Sunday, Austria will elect a new Parliament, and this time there is none of the controversy that characterized the Waldheim campaign. Some observers say the campaign is cleaner than clean, to the point of being a bore.

Close Contest

The contest is between the governing Socialists and the conservative People’s Party, and according to public opinion samples, it is extremely close. Possibly because differences in the party platforms are so slight, attention has been directed as never before to shoring up the nation’s image.

“I think there’s been a common concern that we have no repetition of the last campaign,” said Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, who heads the Socialist Party list of candidates. “Everyone is being careful.”

Even the party slogans are taking the high road. Vranitzky’s posters call him “the man Austria trusts.”

Alois Mock, 52, candidate of the People’s Party, is recommended as “the man who does it better.”

Waldheim Is an Issue

Only the radical Greens mention the unmentionable. Its slogan: “Vote Green to make it clear he’s not our president.”

“He,” of course, is Waldheim, who won a six-year term as Austria’s president as the result of receiving 54% of the vote in June, despite all the questions that were raised about his conduct as an officer in the German army in World War II.

In the wake of the Waldheim victory--he ran as an independent but was supported by the People’s Party--the Socialist chancellor, Fred Sinowatz, resigned in favor of the dynamic 49-year-old finance minister, Vranitzky, who has turned out to be an appealing political figure.

Interviewed on a recent evening in the ornate, high-ceilinged chancellor’s office, Vranitzky admitted that his party had been several percentage points behind but was now running “head-to-head, as we say.”

Political, Economic Decay

According to his advisers, the tall, affable chief executive is in a sense running against his party, for the opposition is arguing that the party has been in power too long, for 16 years, and that corruption and senility have set in.

Despite the country’s obvious signs of political and economic decay, Vranitzky has been able to argue that Austrians have lived well in the past dozen years. And he has made it clear that he thinks they will do even better with him at the helm of a new Socialist government.

He has even stolen some of the conservatives’ thunder, by agreeing that parts of Austria’s largely nationalized economy should be returned to private ownership.

“We have to adapt our attitudes to the challenges ahead,” he said, “and develop new ideas, new techniques and closer cooperation with the European Community.”

Image Needs Repair

He readily admits that Austria must repair its international image.

“We have to pay attention to this,” he said, “and convince our friends abroad that these criticisms were based more on rhetoric than on facts.”

Vranitzky believes that Austria was unjustly criticized during the Waldheim campaign. There were suggestions then that Austria’s Nazi past had been conveniently overlooked, and that anti-Semitism was deeply rooted in the Austrian character.

Austria was hurt, too, by a wine scandal. Some wines from the Bergenland region were tainted by the additives in an attempt to make them resemble a more expensive grade of wine, and the resultant furor has affected wine exports.

‘Better Side’ Forgotten

“With all this,” Vranitzky said, “people tended to forget our better side. After all, our democracy is only 40 years old. And we are on the East-West border. But we took in thousands of refugees from the Hungarian uprising in 1956. We did the same during the Czechoslovakian crisis in 1968, and we have served as an exit point for Jews from the Soviet Union. But suddenly, during a few weeks in a campaign earlier this year, we were put in a corner we had never been in.”

Vranitzky’s view of Austria is pretty much shared by his opponent, Mock, and the campaign strategists of the People’s Party.

Heribert Steinbauer, a shrewd member of Parliament who is running the Mock campaign--he also directed the Waldheim campaign--said in an interview: “It is a fact that we developed a bad image, and people are still shellshocked. One of the needs for a new government will be to develop methods to improve our image.

Coalition Possible

“We have relied too much on the software of our past and not enough on the hardware of our present. We have had to learn that our beautiful, white Lippizaner horses”--the world-renowned horses named for the imperial Austrian stud farm--”are not enough. Many things have to be done, and it will take more than a week. I believe that the media overreacted to Waldheim, but that is something we have to live with.”

Like many Socialist opponents, Steinbauer is not averse, in principle, to forming a “grand coalition,” a government of the two principal parties. Neither is expected to win a clear majority of the votes.

“Much will depend on who gets the most votes,” he said. “We don’t want to be just a junior partner. We want to see that changes are made in the country. Sixteen years under one party is just too long.”

Steinbauer did not rule out a coalition, either, between his People’s Party and the Freedom Party, a small but growing group of old liberals and neo-Nazis.

‘He’s Slick, Flamboyant’

Under a young, nationalistic leader, Joerg Haider, 36, the Freedom Party has moved to the far right. And it was Chancellor Vranitzky’s decision to dissolve his coalition with the Freedom Party that led to the elections.

“I have seen Haider in Parliament,” Steinbauer said. “He’s young, slick, flamboyant and adaptable. He can out-Nazi the Nazis when he chooses. He got in because his party has lost half their votes in the last three years in coalition.”

The conservative Mock is handsome but comes across woodenly on the television screen, and most observers believe that in a recent televised debate with Vranitzky he came out second-best.

Still, Steinbauer argues that Mock is the more experienced, having held a wider range of posts than Vranitzky, whose expertise before becoming chancellor was confined to banking and finance.

‘Fresh Government’ Sought

“We need a fresh government,” Steinbauer insists, a government that will provide change, reduce taxes, and modernize the country. “As of now, this election will be decided by all those undecideds out there.”

Vranitzky said he will not enter into any coalition with the Freedom Party, which some experts think may receive as much as 10% of the vote. And he thinks it unlikely that the Greens will enter into any coalition with him.

As the campaign closes, another Viennese who believes that the politicians should be concerned about Austria’s image is Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, director of the Jewish Documentation Center here.

“Your image is like your health,” Wiesenthal said in his book-cluttered office. “You recognize its value when you lose it. We must recover ours.”

No Proof

Wiesenthal, who has compiled evidence against more than 1,000 former Nazis, believes that the war crimes case against Waldheim has not been proved. This view puts him at odds with officials in New York at the World Jewish Congress, which opened the charges against Waldheim. Specifically, Waldheim was accused of taking part in, or at least knowing about, deportations to Nazi death camps and reprisals against people in the Balkan countries where his German army unit was active.

“I am not trying to protect Waldheim,” Wiesenthal said. “I am protecting the truth. Give me evidence against him, iron evidence. I have seen no evidence that he was involved in a crime, ordered a crime, or proposed a crime. If I did, I as an Austrian citizen would ask him to resign.”

No Solution Seen

Wiesenthal has proposed the formation of a committee of military historians, from the United States, Britain, Israel, Austria, Greece, Yugoslavia and Germany, to investigate the charges against Waldheim.

“The proposal was not accepted by the World Jewish Congress,” he said. “I don’t see any other solution to this question.”

As for Austria’s “guilt” in connection with World War II, when it was part of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, Wiesenthal said: “As a Jew, I know we have spent 2,000 years threatened collectively. You cannot make a collective threat against a people.”

In recent years, Vienna has been making a cultural and popular comeback. The city has a new bustle, the center is lively at night, and the old coffeehouses are filled with people again.

Mounting Problems

But the new government, whatever its composition, will have to cope with mounting problems: a large public debt, overstaffing in the bureaucracy and state-owned companies, rising unemployment, a burdensome welfare system and, of course, the national image.

“I’d like to see our country play a stronger role in world affairs,” Vranitzky said, “hosting international meetings like the current CSCE (Conferance on Security and Cooperation in Europe), using our diplomatic offices as a third country in disputes between nations, and contributing to the international community of states.”

Emphasizing that Vienna is only 40 miles from the Iron Curtain, Vranitzky said, “I’d also like Americans to know that while we are a neutral country militarily, we are firmly on the side of the Western democracies.”