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Austria Political Life of the 1920s and Early 1930s
With traditional sources of food and coal located across new
national borders, Austria suffered extreme economic dislocation,
and the country's economic viability was in doubt. Moreover,
having settled the immediate questions of the peace treaty and
constitution, the SDAP and CSP found it increasingly difficult to
cooperate. Unfortunately, the October 1920 parliamentary
elections did not provide the basis for a stable government. The
CSP increased its share of the vote to 41.8 percent, while the
SDAP declined to 36.0 percent and the Nationals to 17.2 percent.
Seipel tried to form an antisocialist coalition with the
Nationals, but that party was not yet prepared to set aside its
own ideological differences with the CSP. Weak, neutral
governments guided the country for the next two years.
In 1922 Seipel assumed the office of chancellor (prime
minister). By adroitly manipulating the European political
situation and accepting renewed prohibitions on union with
Germany, he managed to obtain foreign loans to launch an economic
stabilization plan. Although the plan stabilized the currency and
set state finances on a sound course, it provided no solution to
the underlying economic problems and dislocation, and it
extracted a high social cost by cutting government social
programs and raising taxes.
Otto Bauer, leader of the SDAP, kept the party in
self-imposed isolation after the collapse of the initial SDAP-CSP
coalition in the belief that the natural role for a socialist
party in a bourgeois democracy was opposition. Thus, Seipel
remained the key public figure in Austrian national politics
throughout the 1920s, even though he did not continuously serve
as chancellor. Nevertheless, the CSP was not able to win an
outright majority in the Nationalrat, and the SDAP registered
steady gains among voters, polling 41 percent of the vote in 1927
against 55 percent of the CSP-National coalition. Vienna, which
was given the status of a province under the 1920 constitution,
was the SDAP stronghold. Vienna's city government of Social
Democrats purposely sought to make health and housing programs
and socialist-inspired "workers' culture" of "Red Vienna" a model
for the rest of Austria.
Although the CSP had secured the suppression of the SDAPcontrolled Volkswehr in 1922 when a more traditional army was
established, the SDAP responded by forming the Republikanischer
Schutzbund (Republican Defense League). Well armed and well
trained, it numbered some 80,000 members by the early 1930s. Of
even greater political significance, however, were the
provincial-based homeland militias, variously called the Heimwehr
(Home Guard) and the Heimatschutz (Homeland Defense).
Independently organized, these militias initially lacked any
overarching political ideology except anti-Marxism. Until 1927
they were not an effective political force and were viewed by
many, including Seipel, as a military reserve supplementing
inadequate military and police forces. In the late 1920s,
however, the Heimwehr gained greater ideological coherence from
contact with Italian fascism. But with the exception of the
Styrian branch, the Heimwehr was unable to bridge differences
with Austrian Nazis. For this reason, the Heimwehr leader, Prince
Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg, founded a Heimwehr political wing,
the Heimatbloc (Homeland Bloc), in 1930.
In the parliamentary election of 1930, the CSP experienced a
severe setback, winning only sixty-six seats to the SDAP's
seventy-two. The Heimatbloc picked up the seven seats lost by the
CSP. Although the CSP-National coalition had broken down in the
late 1920s, a new government was formed that combined the CSP
with the Nationals and the peasant-based Landbund. Eager for a
political success to bolster its popular support, the government
began negotiations with Germany for a customs union in March
1931. When France learned of the negotiations, however, it
immediately denounced the proposal as a violation of the
international ban on Austrian-German unification. Under severe
diplomatic pressure, Austria and Germany were forced to drop
their plans, but not before France's economic retaliation had led
to the collapse of Austria's largest bank, the Creditanstalt, in
June 1931.
In the wake of this foreign policy and economic disaster,
Seipel sought a new coalition between the CSP and the SDAP but
was rebuffed. With no other alternative, Seipel resurrected the
CSP-National coalition. The growing political strength of the
Nazis in Germany and the worsening economic conditions marked by
the rise in unemployment from about 280,000 in 1929 to nearly
600,000 in 1933, however, were effecting a political realignment
in Austria. In the spring of 1932, the Austrian branch of the
Nazi Party registered important gains in local elections.
Although the CSP lost important segments of its constituency to
the Nazis, the parties in the nationalist camp suffered greater
defections, especially after Nazi triumphs in Germany in early
1933. Austrian elections were increasingly three-way contests
among the CSP, the SDAP, and the Nazi Party.
Data as of December 1993
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