Filzmaier analyzes – NEOS: We are something better!

Are you young and smart, come from a good family and have a formal higher education? Do you have many open career paths as a student, employee or entrepreneur? Do you or your parents have a relatively large amount of money? Can you afford to complain about inflation and still pay two, three or five times the price?

Can NEOS really understand the day-to-day worries of inflation?
If so, congratulations! They fit the NEOS loot scheme. The majority of their voters fell on the butter side of life. The same goes for pink politicians. Your condolences to people who are worse off, that is honestly meant. But can they really empathize with the daily worries of people who regularly have no money for, for example, food, clothing and heating?

If not, the NEOS cannot be believed that through their policies every citizen can improve their own living conditions and those of their children. The NEOS convey too much of a dedicated focus on performance, which just scares anyone who has gotten off to a bad start climbing various career and income ladders.

The NEOS themselves would not see themselves as a better society, but by the better term they would mean that they were progressive and scandal free. Traditional parties – ÖVP, SPÖ and FPÖ – stand for a standstill to preserve their own benevolence and kindness to sometimes palpable corruption. Something is going on, but critics see things differently.

The NEOS have performed important audit work in Parliament’s investigative committees. Recently, a turquoise-black morality picture was shown of agreements and intrigue surrounding questionable job scams and government contracts. Now, however, the political (!) actions and behavior of the government in such committees are examined as a minority right of the opposition under Article 53 of our constitution. It is not a criminal case, so the NEOS, for example, should not have complained personally about the continuation of politics by other means.

Liberalism as a stumbling block in the fight against inflation
In politics ‘be better’ must mean that you can do something better after all. In terms of content, NEOS reached the limits of their liberal ideology in the last years of the crisis. Liberalism wants the greatest possible independence and freedom of the individual citizen. Government intervention should be kept to a minimum. With this – with the free market in the economy – the NEOS will not get very far in the fight against inflation.

In terms of craftsmanship, Beate Meinl-Reisinger & Co. must be better at crisis management and crisis communication than the current federal government to combat inflation and energy shortages and the corona pandemic. Now this has ruined a lot of things, but is there a track record of NEOS? The state councilors Christoph Wiederkehr in Vienna and Andrea Klambauer in Salzburg did nothing as members of the government. Nor are they ingenious crisis managers.

But most importantly, when NEOS politicians accuse the Greens of giving up their ideals for a few crumbs of government power, is it any different? Where there was a real opportunity, the NEOS immediately formed a coalition. In Vienna with the SPÖ, in Salzburg with the ÖVP and the Greens. It is plausible that the NEOS at the federal level will not remain as a control party in the opposition, but will come to an arrangement with the People’s Party or SPÖ plus the Greens.

Increases in votes bring little to the party
For the next National Council elections, Tyrol, Lower Austria, Carinthia and Salzburg will elect their state parliaments. The NEOS is expected to achieve vote rates everywhere. But does the party benefit from that? Maybe not. In Tyrol you would have to be part of a complicated coalition of three or four, and in Salzburg stay in one of them. Both are uncertain.

In Lower Austria, NEOS would have to almost double the number of votes to appoint a proportional provincial councilor. You should be twice as good in Carinthia, where you didn’t even get into the state parliament. The current survey successes of NEOS are therefore a sample without value for the time being.