Word: proporz
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...left behind in Vienna a group of ministers who - together with their coalition partners, the conservative People's Party of Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel - managed to accomplish a few things. They slashed spending, briefly eliminated the deficit, and wrested control of government-owned enterprises from the old proporz system, which for 50 years had divided plum public-sector jobs between socialist and conservative party loyalists. Haider still pulled some strings from Carinthia, but the low-key Freedom Party Vice Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer won acceptance as a surprisingly moderate voice in international affairs. Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser...
Though the renewed coalition will force an almost equal division of Cabinet posts with the People's Party, Kreisky has forsworn any return to the old Proporz (proportional) system of previous coalitions. Under that system, every Minister had to accept a watchdog state secretary from the other party, and government jobs all the way down to janitor were divided along party lines...
Austria owes the success of its postwar political balancing act, Proporz, to a happy band of anonymous voters who sportingly cast their ballots for a Socialist for the presidency, though they return the conservative People's Party in general elections. As a result, since the war Austria has had a Socialist President to offset the conservative Chancellors who headed its coalitions...
This year it looked as if Proporz might be upset. The conservative presidential candidate, suave ex-Chancellor Dr. Alfons Gorbach, 66, was a nationally known politician as well as a World War I hero with a prosthetic limb to prove it. The Socialists' lackluster Franz Jonas, 65, mayor of Vienna and a onetime Linotype operator, was not only unknown outside Vienna but had neither a university degree nor a "Herr Doktor" to his name. This inspired one comic to chortle: "Austria has a choice between a Holzbein [wooden leg] and a Holzkopf [wooden head...
Moreover, since the state owns or controls all utilities, the two largest banks and two-thirds of all joint-stock companies. Proporz extends into corporate affairs and justifies featherbedding right on down to washroom attendants. A standard joke has it that "there are three people for every job in Austria, one conservative, one Socialist, and one to do the work...