Image: (APA/HELMUT FOHRINGER)
Party leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner said after the presidium that a result could be presented to the board. Federal Managing Director Christian Deutsch assumes that there will be a long list of candidates. Resistance from several countries on the board is foreseeable.
Filter out “fake requests”.
The second President of the National Council, Doris Bures (SPÖ), was confident that a good solution would be found. She spoke of a unanimous result in the Presidium. Before and after the meeting, Deutsch said that “fake applications” would now be filtered out.
The candidates – 73 have come forward – would be asked to submit their data and introduce themselves this week. A run-off election would not be necessary afterwards if no one had an absolute majority, since the member survey was only about collecting a “mood”, the federal manager had already said in the morning.
Applications for support mandatory?
It remains to be seen whether this broad field of candidates will please the board of directors. Several state organizations – including the Burgenland of the party leader candidate Hans Peter Doskozil – are said to want a certain number of declarations of support to be submitted so that one can compete. Upper Austria’s head of state Michael Lindner and Tyrol’s Georg Dornauer made this position public before the presidency.
No peaceful end in sight
Other prominent representatives of national organizations joined in informal discussions. The aim was for the field of candidates not to be much larger than the three promising candidates Rendi-Wagner, Doskozil and Andreas Babler, Mayor of Traiskirchen.
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The majorities between the two camps on the board are tight, and the outcome is correspondingly uncertain. The group, which advocates a smaller field of candidates, did not comment further before the board. A peaceful end was not necessarily evident at lunchtime.
New members should commit themselves
There is also the wish that the new members – around 9,000 after all – should commit themselves to the party for at least a few months with membership fees. The concern is that many will only shell out the 6.50 euros once to push a candidate and then leave the SPÖ again. For example, the district party in Vienna-Alsergrund, which supports Traiskirchen Mayor Andreas Babler, has gained a striking number of new members. Here, a consensual approach was foreseeable.
The SPÖ women have their own agenda. As its boss Eva Maria Holzleitner told the presidency, all candidates will be given a women’s policy questionnaire – as a kind of decision-making aid.
Source: Nachrichten
