Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
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Tragedy struck in Valley Mills, Texas, on Friday when Grayson Boggs, a six-year-old boy, passed away after being struck by lightning. This same lightning bolt had taken his father’s life, 34-year-old Matthew Boggs, just weeks before.
The incident occurred on May 15 when Grayson and his brother Elijah, 11, were dropped off from school by a bus. When the family was walking home, Grayson and his father held hands when a lightning bolt suddenly struck Mr. Boggs’ body and traveled to Grayson.
The intense force of the lightning bolt caused them both to be thrown out of their shoes and to land face-down on the driveway. When family members rolled Mr. Boggs over, they saw he had already turned blue. While a neighbor started life-saving measures on Mr. Boggs, family members began CPR on Grayson. Unfortunately, Mr. Boggs did not survive.
Grayson was then taken to Baylor Scott & White McLane Children’s Medical Center in Temple, Texas, where he had been on a ventilator and having seizures for the past four weeks. Unfortunately, doctors informed the family that Grayson’s condition would not improve, and he was taken off the ventilator on Tuesday. He passed away at 5:05 p.m. on Friday.
To cover the funeral expenses, a GoFundMe page was created by a cousin. This page has since raised over $89,000.
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The site of the planned consular office is currently being used as a parking lot.
By Pesach Benson, TPS
Russia and Israel signed an agreement to open a consulate office in Jerusalem, Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Russian embassy announced on Friday. But why now?
The agreed-upon location in central Jerusalem resolves a long-running dispute over a plot of land located at the corner of what is now King George V and Ma’alot Streets. The plot of land was purchased by Russia in 1885.
The Jerusalem municipality is reportedly relinquishing claims on years of unpaid taxes as well as cancelling a plan to expropriate a portion of the property for the construction of a light rail line on King George St., a main traffic artery.
The site of the planned consular office is currently being used as a parking lot. The announcements did not indicate a timetable for when construction will begin or when the Russians hope to open the consulate.
Professor Ze’ev Khanin, an expert on post-Soviet politics and society at Bar Ilan University, told the Tazpit Press Service that there were several factors behind the timing of the agreement.
“There are very few Western countries that are ready to have anything to do with Russia. It’s important for them that Israel as a Western country is able or ready to sign an agreement. They need to show to the Russian public any success in a foreign policy issue. That’s what they need at the moment,” Khanin explained.
Another reason, Khanin said, is that “Putin is desperate to reach understandings and get support from the Arab countries, like the Saudi bloc.” Opening a consulate in Jerusalem signals to the Arabs that “Russia has other options in the Middle East.”
Khanin also noted that the agreement on the consulate was actually reached a month ago, but the announcement’s timing may also be a counterweight to Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska’s visit to Israel this week.
Khanin said that “Israel is interested to keep a balanced relationship with Russia, meaning our interest on the northern borders like Syria and so on,” referring to Israeli airstrikes against Iran and its proxy terror groups. Israel and Russia have security coordination to avoid firing on each other, but that arrangement has been strained by the war in Ukraine.
Then there’s the issue of Russian Orthodox Church properties in the Holy Land.
That issue, he explained, goes back 20 years to the unification of the Russian Orthodox Church, which split during the Bolshevik Revolution. The church owns dozens of properties in Jerusalem and more around Israel that were purchased in the 19th century.
“Now Russia is demanding these properties back. Some properties have been returned, and it’s in Russia’s interests to get the rest of the properties back. It has a lot to do with church politics,” Khanin said. “Israel wants to close this chapter on the church properties.”
Khanin stressed that a number of European countries also maintain consulates in Jerusalem, so the fact that Russia is doing likewise “is not dramatic.”
Russia unexpectedly recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April 2017, but maintains its embassy in Tel Aviv.
The U.S., Guatemala, Honduras and Kosovo maintain embassies in Jerusalem.
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Dimitri Lascaris will embark upon a Canada-wide speaking tour next week to report back to Canadians about his recent mission of peace to Russia. The title of the tour is “Making Peace With Russia, One Handshake At A Time.”
In …
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French philosopher and social scientist Jean Baudrillard in Paris. (Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images)
What should we think of Jean Baudrillard today? While he was once a key reference point for any student of late-capitalist hyperreality, nobody seems to have said anything about him for years.
On the one hand, this neglect is puzzling. Baudrillard’s pronouncements about the collapse of the line between reality and simulation are surely more prescient than ever, with Russian generals live-streaming their assaults on Ukrainian cities and QAnon “researchers” turning enigmatic 8chan poems into real-world insurrections.
On the other hand, it seems perfectly reasonable: with the revitalization of socialist politics, the performative radicalism of much of Baudrillard’s later work — accompanied by dismissals of Marxism and indeed any emancipatory political project — appear all the more vacuous. Perry Anderson once described Baudrillard as “a thinker whose temper, for better or worse, is incapable of assent to any notion with collective acceptation.” At a time when “thinking differently” for its own sake is the preserve of the far right, it’s doubtful if this kind of attitude will help us.
However, Baudrillard was not always convinced of the inefficacy of left-wing politics or the redundancy of Marxism as a theoretical framework. Indeed, his first three books — The System of Objects (1968), The Society of Consumption (1970), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) — demonstrate a sustained effort to update Marxism so it could address the pressing questions of his time.
How should we explain the decomposition of the working class in the postwar era? What did mass consumption have to do with the decline of workers’ struggles? While Baudrillard’s replies to such questions unravel over the years into increasingly unserious proclamations about a “new phase” of semiotic capitalism, his shifting orientations can tell us much about the trajectory of French theory and the partial critique of capitalism that it left in its wake.
Beginning his intellectual career as a Germanist, Baudrillard cotranslated Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology into French, read Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s work before it was translated, and encountered Georg Lukács early on. But it seems he took “literally,” as Charles Levin writes, Lukács’s claim that “the problem of commodities” was “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects.”
Jean Baudrillard’s pronouncements about the collapse of the line between reality and simulation are surely more prescient than ever today.
In other words, the commodity was not for Baudrillard a fetishized bearer of capitalist social relations, making those relations appear as things external to us. It was quite literally an object, and the analysis of this object was for him the primary task of theoretical critique.
Thus The System of Objects, Baudrillard’s first book and doctoral thesis, sought to undertake a kind of zoological survey of everyday objects, beginning with the following question:
Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction?
This luxuriant growth of objects attested to what Kristin Ross describes as the “jolt” of French modernization in the postwar years: a transition from wartime poverty to consumerist domesticity that took place with remarkable speed, making the 1960s unrecognizable from the vista of a decade earlier. As Ross writes:
In the space of just ten years, a rural woman might live the acquisition of electricity, running water, a stove, a refrigerator, a washing machine, a sense of interior space as distinct from exterior space, a car, a television, and the various liberations and oppressions associated with each.
Such changes, which were felt equally in the rapidly expanding cities, explained why so many French intellectuals of that time — Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, Edgar Morin, the Situationists — seized on the category of “everyday life” as a key to an understanding of the social order.
For Baudrillard, what these objects told us was above all something about the changing composition of class. Objects, for him, were not principally functional things. They were signs: signs through which class relations were communicated and reproduced, through which needs were fabricated and value extracted, and through which class antagonisms were stifled.
Any object thus needed to be understood from the perspective of its “sign value.” This was a dubious category that Baudrillard invented to supplement (and, eventually, to replace) Marx’s categories of use value and exchange value in his analysis of the commodity.
Sign value was, for Baudrillard, at the very core of how postwar capitalism functioned. The capacity for mass production outstripped demand, and hence new needs had to be manufactured and new desires fabricated into existence. Objects became unmoored from their use values, and a matrix of symbolic meanings propelled both production and consumption onward.
Baudrillard would eventually take this to mean that capitalism had itself been transformed into a semiotic system — a play of signifiers untethered from any material foundation. This myopic focus on the semiotic level was soon mirrored in the cultural or linguistic turn in social theory from the 1980s. This turn involved dispensing with any serious analysis of the huge changes taking place in the reconfiguration of labor, exploitation, and class relations across the globe and dismissing any form of materialist critique as economistic or class reductionist.
Yet when he wrote Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Baudrillard was still working within a broadly Marxist framework and intrigued by the mechanics of class reproduction. His own background was located somewhere in the complicated matrix of the “middle classes” — his grandparents were peasants while his parents were civil servants (“very lowly petty bourgeois,” as he put it) — and the middle classes were a central preoccupation of this book.
Baudrillard was fascinated by the singular way these middle classes related to domestic objects. What was behind the fixation on drapes, double drapes, carpets, slipcovers, coasters, wainscoting, lampshades, plinths, trinkets, and wire netting? What of the table that is “covered with a tablecloth which itself is protected by a plastic tablecloth,” the encircling of each artifact by a doily, or the moral elevation of coatings — “the triumph of varnish, polish, veneer, plating, wax, encaustic, lacquer, glaze, glass, plastic”?
Baudrillard was fascinated by the singular way the middle classes related to domestic objects.
For Baudrillard, this baroque covering and encircling of possessions spoke to a compulsion “not merely to possess, but to underline what he possesses two or three times.” This compulsion in turn revealed the fraught position of the growing middle class: simultaneously anxious and triumphant, this was “a class which has gone far enough to interiorize the models of social success, but not far enough to avoid simultaneously interiorizing the defeat.”
That is to say, the middle classes saw both their success (the possession of domestic objects) and failure (the hard limit on their social power) as of their own making. They accepted the comforting aura of objects as a compensation for their surrendered agency. It was this “thwarted legitimacy (with respect to cultural, political, and professional life) which makes the middle classes invest in the private universe, in private property and the accumulation of objects,” according to Baudrillard. The doily spoke of class compromise.
The problem Baudrillard sought to investigate — what was once called the “embourgeoisement” of the working class and its relationship to its ongoing decomposition — was, and is, a real problem. The current mystification about why many apparently working-class constituencies seem to have abandoned their class interests to vote for far-right parties could perhaps be overcome with a better understanding of just who the middle classes are (for example, whether we should see them as a much-enlarged petty bourgeoisie, as Dan Evans suggests).
Yet Baudrillard’s approach to this problem was always one-sided. His microscopic attention to the arrangement of household objects placed out of the line of vision the immense shifts in labor and production that were taking place at the time. This emphasis seeps into his worldview: mass consumption seems to be no longer simply one site of class reproduction, and one important condition for capital’s self-accumulation, but the driving force of the entire system. On this basis, we can only understand resistance as the rejection of consumption and of the symbolic order underpinning it.
Working in the Sociology Department at Nanterre in March 1968, Baudrillard had found himself at ground zero of the student movement.
This seemed, for Baudrillard, to be confirmed by his experiences of political struggle. Working as Lefebvre’s assistant in the Sociology Department at Nanterre in March 1968, he had found himself at ground zero of the student movement. But after Charles de Gaulle’s landslide election victory in June that year, he recalled, “the movement fell away at fantastic — really fantastic — speed.”
Many of those involved in that movement argued that its failure was rooted in the contradictions between its worker and student base. The major labor organizations, such as the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), had sought to defuse the general strike, while French Communist Party (PCF) leaders denounced the student leaders as “false revolutionaries.” Yet if the workers’ institutions had sold out, it seemed that they did so, at least in part, in response to their base. As one speaker in a Nanterre faculty discussion put it, the working class had become “hung up on consumption.”
Those least attached to consumption seemed to hold the greatest revolutionary potential. Students, women, gays and lesbians, migrants: all those deprived, for various reasons, of a stable family wage or the dream of consumer domesticity had erupted into the public sphere with what Baudrillard called sauvage (wild) political conduct. From migrant workers’ wildcat strikes to student revolts, these “marginal” figures appeared to be the only ones capable of challenging what he called the “domestication” of humanity.
“Wild” strikes seemed, for Baudrillard, to express a fundamentally noninstrumental logic: “Overtly, collectively, spontaneously, the workers stopped working, like that, suddenly, one Monday, demanding nothing, negotiating for nothing.” They seemed to take heed neither of the intrinsic value of work, nor the salaried incentive, nor the capitalist rationalization of time.
Ultimately, the sauvage politics of the post-’68 landscape reflected the savage mind, with its refusal of all the old Marxist categories that seemed now to oppress us: production, labor, use value, universal history, revolution, dialectics, mediation, representation. For Baudrillard, all such categories revealed “an incurable ethnocentrism of the code.” They were trapped in the logic of the very system they sought to contest.
Baudrillard’s early writings thus reflect the same tendencies — and the same problems — as those of many New Left thinkers who sought to reinvigorate Marxism for the postwar era. This was a period of such booming prosperity that Marx’s thesis of growing proletarian immiseration seemed to have been disproven: crises ceased, productivity increased, wages rose, and the middle classes grew.
These conditions gave rise to a form of social theory that focused on alienation rather than exploitation, as the central problem of Western democracies appeared to be not precarity, poverty, and crisis but the commodification of everyday life. People were unfree not because they faced chronic material insecurity — or so it seemed — but because of the subsumption of human life and activity by the rationalistic injunctions to buy, sell, and consume.
As Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects:
Just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge — in short, all the properly human faculties — are integrated as commodities into the order of production . . . so likewise all desires, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and as objects to be bought and consumed.
In other words, capitalism was a problem because of reification: it converted human life into things and flattened its irreducible variety into the standardized quantities required for exchange.
From our vantage point today, it seems clear that this critique is a partial one; it mistakes the symptom for the disease. To see reification, consumption, and commodification as the primary problems gave rise to political responses seeking simply to negate these things: de-reification, anti-consumerism, decommodification.
Baudrillard wanted to de-reify the world by introducing new categories — symbolic exchange, which took from Georges Bataille a fascination with waste, excess, and expenditure, was the most important of them. It was as if such vocabulary could itself overcome the dominance of capitalist relations. Other thinkers, less cynical than him, would build several generations of political radicalism on the basis of anti-consumerism and decommodification.
Anti-consumerism in itself is by no means an emancipatory position.
Of course, anti-consumerism in itself is by no means an emancipatory position. And decommodification has always been as much a moment of capitalist accumulation as the encroachment of commodity relations into ever greater corners of social life. Decommodification could just as easily be a project of leading women back from the workplace to their “natural” sphere, the home, as is the goal of many far-right movements today.
Indeed, leading far-right thinkers, such as Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin, are well-versed in the New Left’s critique of commodification and consumption. For the far right, “woke capitalism” erases our identities — which it fantasizes as being fixed in a biological or racial essence — by making us consume and in order to make us better consume. As Italy’s far-right premier Giorgia Meloni put it in a speech from 2019:
I can’t define myself as Italian, Christian, woman, mother. No. I must be citizen x, gender x, parent 1, parent 2. I must be a number. Because when I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave at the mercy of financial speculators. The perfect consumer.
Baudrillard was not himself a far-right thinker. However, his later works, such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, are underpinned by precisely the kind of clash-of-civilizations narratives upon which the far right thrives today. As Peter Osborne wrote, beneath all his apparent radicalism lay “the most hackneyed civilizational conservatism” — this was “a philosophical discourse of modernity in the worst sense.”
Baudrillard didn’t start off like this, and his early writings reflected a genuine effort to rethink the economistic Marxism of the French Communist Party and to understand the decomposition of the working class. Yet his brand of anti-capitalism shows itself to be a shaky foundation for an emancipatory politics.
The new leader of Austria’s Social Democratic Party, Andreas Babler, addresses a press conference on June 6, 2023 in Vienna, Austria. (Helmut Fohringer / APA / AFP via Getty Images)
On Monday, June 5, Austria’s Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) made an astonishing announcement. At the special party conference two days beforehand, the leadership race between Hans Peter Doskozil and Andreas Babler was to be decided by an assembly of 609 appointed delegates at a special party conference. Babler gave an impassioned speech that brought a standing ovation, yet it was to no avail.
The results came in: out of 596 valid ballots, Doskozil had won with 316 to Babler’s 279. As Doskozil gave his victory speech and Babler congratulated him magnanimously, journalist Martin Thür was quick to spot an error in the SPÖ’s published results: “316 plus 279 equals 595, not 596.” So, where did this extra vote come from? The electoral commission at the conference in Linz called SPÖ headquarters in Vienna, but with party staff off work for the rest of the day and Sunday, the SPÖ’s voting committee would only reconvene on Monday and find the missing vote was far from the only error.
Astonishingly, they found the votes on an Excel spreadsheet had been mixed up and attributed to the wrong candidates. Andreas “Andi” Babler, the socialist mayor of the small, Lower Austrian town of Traiskirchen, had, in fact, won by 317 votes to 280 and would be the new leader of the SPÖ.
Despite the acrimonious circumstances, Babler’s rise to SPÖ leadership is a remarkable coup, and the tempered elation among Babler’s circle will certainly feel better than what Doskozil and his supporters are feeling. Poisoned chalice or not, a principled, left-wing social democrat now leads Austria’s opposition and is uniquely capable of making hay of the crisis his predecessors have sown.
Babler stood as an outsider to the “puppet show” that was the drawn-out political feuding between former leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner and Doskozil in the months prior to the leadership vote. He has pointedly criticized the archaic structures of the party, the unaccountability of its elites, and the opacity of its decision-making processes, all of which came to a head in the events of the last few days. By the time the initial embarrassment passes, Babler will have a strengthened mandate to deliver on his campaign promises. He will be best placed to start afresh, having played no role in this debacle, with his calls for a new direction for social democracy well and truly vindicated.
The story will sound all too familiar to many readers: a rank outsider with socialist credentials stands for the party leadership and inspires a grassroots movement to shift the country’s political direction toward democratic socialism.
Babler’s campaign was predicated on mobilizing the SPÖ’s membership base, and it is no exaggeration to say the legacy of the Jeremy Corbyn movement and Momentum made a crucial difference. Babler beat incumbent Rendi-Wagner by the margin of a mere 175 votes in the members’ vote, granting him the political legitimacy to stand in the run-off vote with Doskozil at the party conference.
What started as an unedifying duel between two party elites thus turned into a substantial debate over democratic socialist policies and a bid to save the SPÖ from its own incoherence.
These votes were secured by the efforts of inspired campaigners, such as those in Solidarität, who put into practice what they had learned from the international Corbyn Brigades in late 2019. Without the tireless organization of such dedicated volunteers in the form of social media campaigns, live events, and phone-banking among the SPÖ’s greying membership, Babler would not have made it this far.
It is less than three months since all of this began, when in March 2023, Rendi-Wagner, the first woman to lead the SPÖ, was forced by the party board to contend a snap leadership election intended to be between her and SPÖ leader of the Burgenland state, Doskozil. This came after years of public criticism from Doskozil against her leadership.
With two days until the registration deadline for new candidates, Andi Babler threw his hat into the ring and changed the script entirely, but coming from a position of relative obscurity, he had a mountain to climb. His plan was to galvanize the grassroots membership and travel to every corner of Austria on his campaign trail. What started as an unedifying duel between two party elites thus turned into a substantial debate over democratic socialist policies and a bid to save the SPÖ from its own incoherence.
Under Rendi-Wagner, the SPÖ could not take advantage of the persistent scandals and corruption surrounding the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) or their hapless coalition government partners, the Greens (die Grünen). The party that made Red Vienna struggled to establish itself as a desirable alternative despite this government’s highly publicized scandals and shortcomings.
The federal state election results in 2023 gave a bleak prognosis, with the SPÖ losing vote shares in three separate state senate elections in Lower Austria, Carinthia and Salzburg states. In the election for Babler’s home state of Lower Austria in January, the party dropped to its lowest-ever vote share from 23.92 percent to 20.65 percent and was leapfrogged by the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which finished in second place.
Then, in the Carinthia elections in March, they lost three of their eighteen seats in the state senate as their vote share fell from 47.9 percent to 38.9 percent. While the leadership race raged on in April, the Salzburg state elections saw the SPÖ lose out again, with its vote share falling from 20 percent to 17.9 percent, as the FPÖ overtook them into second place again, while at the same time, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) surged to an all-time high of 11.5 percent.
Rendi-Wagner’s efforts to lead the party had long been undermined by her tormentor in chief within the party: Doskozil. Doskozil is a former police chief and now leads the state of Burgenland’s SPÖ chapter. In recent times he has bucked the trend that has befallen the SPÖ in other states by running a tightly organized state party. Doskozil’s policy platform calls for an increase in social provisions, not dissimilar to Rendi-Wagner or Babler’s offerings. However, his advocacy for a much harsher border policy, resembling that of Denmark’s social democrats, and his overtures to ÖVP and FPÖ voters place him firmly on the party’s right.
Babler has promised to democratize the party’s alienating hierarchical structures, which lock out most of its party affiliates from major decision-making.
Babler, in contrast, promised to democratize the party’s alienating hierarchical structures, which lock out most of its party affiliates from major decision-making. Instead of the typical backroom deals and party policy imposed from above, he promises to give SPÖ party members the power to meaningfully participate in a truly democratic socialist party.
Babler’s candidacy had clearly given this leadership election a much greater significance, and between him announcing his candidacy on March 23 and the registration deadline at 10 p.m. the day after, nine thousand people had joined the party for the chance to vote. The registration period was subsequently extended, facilitating an influx of new members.
In March, very few people in Austria had heard of Babler. It was generally the case that, the more people found out, the more they liked him; and people are certainly finding out now. Babler comes from the small town of Traiskirchen in Lower Austria, where he has been mayor since 2014.
The town of twenty-one thousand is home to the Semperit rubber factory, where Babler’s father was employed. His politics were forged by the shared experience of his family and neighbors struggling together against the profiteering whims of Semperit’s multinational parent company, Continental Tires, who constantly threatened to outsource jobs abroad.
Continental ultimately moved tire production from Semperit to the Czech Republic in 2002. Babler himself trained as a metalworker and worked in the Vöslauer mineral water factory before studying for a master’s in political communication. Notwithstanding this qualification, Babler’s greatest strength is that he does not speak or act like a typical politician. In his FC St Pauli jacket and jeans, he cuts a down-to-earth, friendly figure who unapologetically wears his politics on his sleeve. Above all, he relishes the opportunity to be with the people, listen to their problems, and offer help where he can. That he and his wife produce wine on a small plot only adds to his relatablity to Austrian voters.
Babler has been an elected member of the Traiskirchen council since 1995 and in city hall since 2007. When he was elected mayor in 2014, he increased his SPÖ predecessor’s mandate from 60 percent to 73 percent. Traiskirchen hosted Austria’s biggest refugee registration center at the time, which was ill-equipped for dealing with the number of asylum applicants. When Babler took the “impossible job” as mayor, he set to work against the Conservative government’s dysfunctional asylum system, not by pandering to the xenophobic whims of his right-wing opponents, but by campaigning for a humane asylum policy whereby asylum seekers would be given due process and provided with accommodation all across the country.
This refugee-friendly approach did not harm his popularity as he won reelection in 2020 at a canter with a 71.5 percent mandate. A Traiskirchen resident pithily summed up the reason for his almost universal popularity in his home town: “He represents a different kind of politics to what the others do these days, and I think people like that.”
Babler has shown his ability to transfer his local popularity into broader political support. In the aforementioned Lower Austria state elections this year, where the SPÖ performed historically poorly, Babler’s performance was the one saving grace. Placed last in the thirty-five-candidate-long Lower Austria SPÖ list, Babler was not fancied by superiors in his own party, but nevertheless, he traveled across all nineteen thousand square kilometers of the state (an area roughly the size of Wales) on his campaign trail.
Ultimately, he gathered an impressive 21,273 first preference votes, making him the best performing, non-leading candidate out of all candidates in the election by some distance (by comparison, the SPÖ lead candidate, Franz Schnabl, returned 24,223 first preference votes). Babler was not allowed to take a seat in the state senate while still being mayor of Traiskirchen, but gained an extra salary which he donated to causes tackling child poverty.
Babler has fought constantly for this cause, championing social initiatives that provide free school meals, kindergarten and after-school care for children from socially disadvantaged families in his hometown and elsewhere. His placement of these issues at the heart of his campaign teased out some bizarre challenges from opponents outside the SPÖ, such as when right-wing journalist Rosemarie Schwaiger claimed, “I do not see where there are any hungry children in Austria.” However, such challenges only served to bring these issues onto the national media agenda.
Community-led initiatives that fight poverty are characteristic of Babler’s politics, but his other prerogative as SPÖ leader is to tackle the alienation and frustration that members have with their party. With the events of the past few days, this mood will have only intensified. The results of the membership vote on May 22 only complicated matters, as the party was split three ways, with Rendi-Wagner fetching 31.35 percent, Babler 31.52 percent, and Doskozil 33.53 percent. Rendi-Wagner stepped down as she had previously agreed to do in the event that she did not win, and Babler called for a runoff between him and Doskozil to ensure a clear mandate for the new leader. The SPÖ instead decided on a vote among senior party delegates at the special conference arranged for June 3.
Michaela Grubesa, who happened to be the partner of Doskozil’s chief campaign strategist, led the electoral commission and called a fateful press conference on Monday afternoon to announce the news that would change the course of Austrian politics. Hilariously, the mix-up was a result of the SPÖ electoral organizers’ inexperience with democratic selections. They were accustomed to conference votes only ever involving a single, uncontested candidate, where a strike through the candidate’s name is typically considered a negative vote.
This time, however, a strike through the candidate’s name counted as a vote in favor, but the SPÖ staff members, following the usual procedure of a vote at party conference, entered these votes into the spreadsheet in a manner that subtracted them from the total number of votes, giving the inverse result. The errors of Monday, June 5, will be riffed on at every vote count and close contest in the German-speaking world for years.
Whether people joke with glee or with gallows humor will now depend on the success of the Babler movement. It is not ideal that his first days in office will be tainted by the calamity of his predecessors, but if this is the price to pay for the chance to carry the hopes of millions of people in Austria, who long for the sort of transformational social democratic policies unseen since the days of Bruno Kreisky, Babler and his voter base will pay it gladly.