"Krone" commentary

Not a dream chancellor: this is Stocker’s chance

Commentary on the major issues affecting Austria: Klaus Herrmann, Managing Editor-in-Chief

(Bild: Krone KREATIV)

Yes, there are figures like the now 65-year-old Alfred Gusenbauer who, even as a child in the sandpit, dreamed of one day becoming Federal Chancellor. After losing this office after just 691 days, he dreamed of wealth, which the later billionaire bankrupt René Benko seemed to help him achieve.

Gusenbauer's compatriot Christian Stocker is cut from a completely different cloth. Yes, a Lower Austrian like the so-called Social Democrat, only one and a half months younger, but one who has certainly not dreamed of the chancellorship. Not in the sandpit, not even as a late-appointed top politician.

When he went to the ÖVP crisis meeting in Vienna in jeans and a sweater on 5 January after the first negotiations on the "Zuckerl" coalition collapsed and his party leader Karl Nehammer subsequently resigned, the then party Secretary General knew, as he recounts, that his career in federal politics was over.

Things turned out quite differently: the party surprisingly appointed him leader and today, barely two months later and after several weeks of ultimately failed negotiations with FPÖ election winner Herbert Kickl on a blue-black government, Stocker is sworn in as Federal Chancellor of a turquoise-red-pink three-party coalition.

Stocker is not so many things: not Gusenbauer, not Kickl, certainly not Trump. He is not a sandbox chancellor, not a dreamer, probably not a dream chancellor.

This is his chance.