Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz will soon be honoured in Germany. On May 11, the
Christian Democratic politician (ÖVP) will receive the Freedom Prize of the Media”, which is awarded by Bavaria’s Weimer Media Group.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will give the induction speech for Kurz. Among the seven previous recipients are Mikhail Gorbachev, Monaco’s Prince Albert II and, most recently, former EU Commission President Jean Claude-Juncker.
In his political career, Kurz has repeatedly proven himself to be a bridge-builder for Europe, the jury said, while explaining its decision to give him the prize. Kurz, according to the nominating board, was a communicator of freedom and has championed the rights of smaller EU states.
Indeed, Kurz, who became Austria’s youngest chancellor in 2017 at the age of 31, was
long considered a political shooting star. German media, in particular, courted him
because he dared to criticise his German party-family colleague, Angela Merkel, on Germany’s refugee policy.
Kurz liked to preach that he had practically single-handedly closed the Balkan route for refugees from Syria. He entered office with the announcement of what he called ‘new politics’. To this end, he also transformed the traditional ÖVP, which is associated in Austria with the color black, to turquoise.
He pushed back on the power of his party-strongholds (farmers, business, employees and civil servants) and the majority of ÖVP-led federal states. Kurz won the 2017 elections largely due to the use of as much as €6 million in illegal campaign expenses. Money flowed from entrepreneurs who later also received quid pro quos in return for their donations, including government posts or changes to laws. Austria’s judiciary is now
investigating many of these donations.
His first coalition with the populist right-wing FPÖ ended in 2019 after a scandal
involving secretly recorded videos of conversations between the then-party leader,
Heinz-Christian Strache, and the alleged niece of a Russian oligarch in Ibiza.
Strache promised the woman a post and business contracts if she supported him and even
announced that heads would roll at Austria’s public radio and TV outlets.
After Strache was forced to resign, the entire Kurz-led government failed to survive a confidence vote. A cabinet of experts took over until new elections were held in the autumn of 2019. Kurz gained a large number of votes and, in early 2020, for the first time in Austria’s history, entered into a coalition with the Greens.
The coalition became a model of hope in the EU. But a year ago, the downfall occurred. The judiciary started investigations into corruption and post-fixing around Kurz, his finance minister and friend Gernot Blümel and the head of the state holding company ÖBAG, Thomas Schmid. Deleted personal messages were reconstructed on confiscated mobile phones.
Schmid was found to have thanked the Chancellor effusively for the job, saying, “I love my Chancellor. You get everything you want” and “You are family”. At the same time, the so-called “Ibiza Affair” became known through an investigative committee in parliament. The investigation found that judicial officials had apparently either warned ÖVP politicians against house searches or had advised them in this regard.
Kurz initially cut a good figure during the pandemic. He called for the first hard lockdown in the spring of 2020 and addressed the public in almost daily TV appearances together
with the Green health minister, Rudolf Anschober. He also travelled to Israel several times to learn from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about his successful vaccination program.
But in early 2021, his leadership during the important vaccine procurement seems to have slipped away. He claimed that a senior Viennese official sitting on the EU’s vaccination panel had not informed him of the possibility to buy additional vaccine that other EU countries left over.
Kurz complained about what he called ‘bazaar methods’ in Brussels for the acquisition of vaccines, but this also had to put into context with criticism that he had
not taken care of the procurement of COVID vaccines, himself.
He later presented himself as a fighter for countries with low vaccine allocations, such as
Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. At the EU summit in March, Kurz then vetoed a planned
distribution of future vaccine supplies in order to secure more vaccine doses for Austria.
In doing so, however, he failed. Kurz was forced to suddenly criticise EU heads of government who, unlike him, had previously procured more vaccine doses.
Health Minister Anschober, who was stricken with illness because of the workload, resigned. He was no longer fit for the job, explained Anschober, whom Kurz had disavowed several times before. He was replaced by Wolfgang Mückstein, a general practitioner.
Kurz’s dealings with the media have recently met with sharp criticism. In the ranking of
Reporters without Borders, Austria has already dropped two places to 18th place in 2020.
One reason for this is Kurz’s ÖVP lawsuit against the liberal weekly Falter, which unveiled the business data of his party as well as the chancellor’s oversized PR apparatus with dozens of message controllers.
It looks like Austria will not be promoted in the new ranking, which will be
published on April 20, for there is now plenty of disinformation as a weapon that is tolerated or ordered by Kurz, who recently launched a new party medium, Zur
Sache, which works against unpopular media with lies and understatements.
The German distinction, therefore, negates the reality in Austria. Sebastian Kurz has not
expanded media freedom in Austria, but restricted it through direct message control via a bloated pr apparatus, the preferential treatment of pro-government media and
most recently through attacks on critical media outlets.
He is responsible for the fact that the lion’s share of the advertisements of state and
state-related agencies are distributed to the tabloid media with the highest circulation in
Austria (last year more than €100 million), whereas quality media receives only a little
money – a procedure known from the so far unchanged state media funding.
On top of that, the Wiener Zeitung, the oldest daily newspaper in the world, owned by the
Republic, is now threatened with closure. The publisher and editor-in-chief of Falter, Armin Thurnher, attacked Kurz head-on in the new issue, saying disinformation, was his new media policy and that Kurz directly goes after any media group that he can’t make subservient to him with money.
Awarding Kurz a prize for fighting for media freedom is, therefore, more than
absurd.