Filzmaier analyzes

Salzburg votes: Are the communists coming?

Municipal council and mayoral elections are being held in Salzburg today. Why should non-Salzburgers be interested, even though they only know the majority of the province's 119 municipalities by name? Because anything is possible in the provincial capital. Let's take a look at the figures.

1. 112,733 citizens are entitled to vote inthe city of Salzburg. That's just 1.7 percent of the total Austrian electorate. In the last election, moreover, half of those entitled to vote stayed at home. People were fed up with Salzburg politics. Former mayor Heinz Schaden (SPÖ) was convicted under criminal law in 2017. Harald Preuner (ÖVP) narrowly won the following election, but always had very limited appeal.

2. There is no incumbency bonus at all in2024. The 64-year-old Preuner decides not to run again. At 54 and 50, Preuner's party colleague Florian Kreibich and long-term challenger Bernhard Auinger (SPÖ) are not new hopefuls either. The co-favorite is 35-year-old Kay-Michael Dankl. Although only seven percent of all mayors are under 40.

Peter Filzmaier is a professor of political science at the University of Continuing Education Krems and the Karl Franzens University Graz.(Bild: Reinhard Holl)

3 Dankl is also a communist. He could become the second KPÖ mayor in a provincial capital after Elke Kahr in Graz. How so? It's clear that the party does better in cities than in the countryside. And in last year's provincial elections, almost twelve percent voted communist. In the city of Salzburg, it was over 20 percent. Yet the KPÖ is polling at three percent nationwide. How can this huge difference be explained, regardless of the final outcome?

4 Parallels with Graz come to mind. When Ernest Kaltenegger and his KPÖ achieved around 20 percent in 2003 and his comrade Elke Kahr, who later became mayor, 28 percent, they also scored points with the housing issue. Other parties had criminally underestimated higher rents and declining housing quality. Or failed to find a solution.

5 Dankl also benefitsfrom this. He is also eloquent and likeable, so that he tries to smile away the problematic past of communism like Kaltenegger and Kahr. He presents extreme ideological viewpoints in a gentle voice. Will that be enough? It is almost certain that we will not know tonight who will become mayor. No one is likely to get more than 50 percent of the vote, so there will be a run-off in two weeks' time. In both rounds of voting, everything depends on the turnout. It therefore remains exciting.