The Ball Rolls Left

Even before the polls closed, a downcast politician at the Vienna headquarters of Austria's conservative People's Party was able to forecast the results. "The ball rolls," he said resignedly, "and it rolls to the left." When all of the nearly 5,000,000 ballots were counted last week, the Socialist Party of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, 60, had won a majority of the vote--the first for any party since the founding of the Austrian Republic in 1918.

One of the first statesmen to congratulate Kreisky was West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. That was particularly appropriate. Both men spent the war years in neutral Sweden, and both are committed to a reformist, pragmatic brand of socialism.

Austria's Socialists, who had ruled as a minority government since coming to power 18 months ago, garnered 50.04% of the total vote; with 93 of the 183 seats in the lower house, they now enjoy a slim majority in both chambers of Parliament. The People's Party received 43.11% and 80 seats. The misnamed Liberal Party (in which the ghosts of German nationalism walk) stayed at 5.45% and ten seats. The swing to the left stopped short of the Communist Party, which took only 1.36% of the vote and once again fell short--as it has since 1956--of winning a single seat.

The absolute majority was a double triumph for the burly, redheaded Kreisky--as Austria's first Chancellor of Jewish extraction and as a Socialist despite his descent from a prosperous industrialist family. His middle-of-the-road government has pressed for legal reforms, stressed the principle of full employment and, according to a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, given Austria the highest sustained growth rate (7.1% in 1970) of any developed country except Japan. That record has helped convince middleclass, small-farmer and white-collar groups that Kreisky's Socialists are not necessarily uncultured rogues who dash around expropriating the property of innocent industrialists. In fact, the first opposition group to issue a congratulatory statement of sorts after last week's victory was the Austrian Industrialists' Association.

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