Word: proporz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...just Schlag in Vienna. The coalition was more or less forced into being to provide an alternative to the Allied occupation, and both parties chafe at it. It survives thanks to an irksome but inevitable invention called Proporz (balance of powers), under which the People's Party gets the chancellorship, but the Socialists the presidency, and every "sensitive" ministry has not only a minister, but also a state secretary from the other party to keep...
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...
Ever since World War II-even through ten years of Soviet occupation-the Austrian government has been run jointly by the conservative People's Party and the Socialist Party, like two polite, equally weighted cousins on an inert seesaw. So scrupulously balanced is the coalition and the Proporz system of dividing up the jobs that, according to Viennese table talk, if there is one People's Party Putz-frau (charwoman) in a government building, there must be a Socialist Putzfrau too. After last November's elections, balance became stalemate; the two big parties have been haggling over...