Monday, July 7, 2008

Austrian coaltion falls apart

I normally try to stay clear of talking about politics on this blog even though some of my entries are definitely set in a political context.

Regardless of that I do have to say that I wasn't really surprised this morning when I checked the Web sites of Austrian newspapers to find that the current coalition had falled apart and we're very likely to have new elections come September. Obviously I haven't followed the politics back home too closely over the past 3 months but I did notice that there seemed to be no progress whatsoever on any of the important issues at hand. Plus this coalition never really clicked anyway, from day one back in January 2007 up to the very end the whole thing very much felt like a forced marriage.

Now obvious question is: what's next? The likely answer is: Not much.

We're going to see a similar campaign as in the past elections in autumn 2006. Some faces might have changed but overall it's still the same party-politics like 10 years ago. The opposition parties will as always try to make some noise and they will likely fail to achieve anything. The one and only thing that I'm as always afraid of is that (one of) the Austrian right-wing parties could again end up in government. Overall it's different elections, same s***.

It's hard not to be frustrated with politics in this kind of messed up situation and as ever so often I'm coming close to ignoring the whole damn thing in order to focus on other things that matter.

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