The 2017 Austrian Parliamentary Elections: The Beginning of the Sebastian Kurz Era

The article deals with the early parliamentary elections in Austria, which resulted from conflicts inside the government. The situation provides a negative example of a long rule of grand coalition. Most Austrians had lost the trust in abilities of the cabinet made up by social democrats (SPÖ) and Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) to deal with problems of the day. The public demanded an end to controversies and change of political style. In the stalemate situation it was ÖVP which initiated irregular elections into National Council. It succeeded in connecting the dynamic and perspective personality of the leader Sebastian Kurz with the image of a new and open movement. During the campaign, it emphasized themes which the Austrian public considered important (migration and asylum policy, better security, reduction of taxes) in combination with professional political marketing. After the elections, negotiations revealed programmatic overlap between ÖVP and Freedom Party of Austria, which placed third, in a number of important areas. The new government worked out an ambitious reform program, for which it secured enough majority support in the National Council; also the favourable economic conditions helped. The article provides analysis of electoral programs and the respective stages of the electoral campaign, making use of extensive electoral materials, including unarchived ones. Besides filling a major descriptive-analytic gap in the Czech scholarly reflection of Austrian politics, the article probes into actual trends of Austrian electoral marketing and electoral behaviour