Old dog teaching new political tricks

In the midst of the large crowd, the old man looks lonely. Hundreds have gathered in the hall of the Bärenwirt. On the stage, a singer going under the stage name Otto Normalverbraucher (Mr Everyman) is belting out “Styrian Men are very good”, and the crowd is clapping enthusiastically along.

Four young ladies, groupies of the guest star, wave red-white-red flags, which match their red-white-red neck scarves – the colours of the new party. The ladies are dark-haired, which is unusual for 80-year-old Frank Stronach, who usually surounds himself with blondes. Stronach, who was born in Styria, sits below the stage, while his team keeps a respectful distance. His eyes on the tabletop, Stronach, lost in the rhythm of the music, raps a little flag on it – as if he were a guest at a party whose purpose he isn’t quite aware of.

Later, when he takes the stage, a respectful hush falls over the hall. Stronach is the leader of “Team Stronach”, and he will be heading the list of candidates in next Sunday’s elections in Lower Austria. Most of the guests know him only from television, where he regularly drives well-prepared interviewers to distraction with long, confusing speeches. Meetings ahead of the two elections – Carinthia is also about to vote on a new parliament – will go on without him. There will only be a lot of muddled bellowing, he explains. The truth is that Stronach does not know how to handle a debate; opinions that differ from his clearly irritate the old man. He was the boss for too long to pretend to be just another guy on the team, despite the name of his party.

Serving Austria

Stronach took the plunge into Austrian politics only nine months ago. He spends much of each year in his adopted country, Canada, where he emigrated as a young man and where he built up the worldwide automotive supplies firm Magna. Now a billionaire, Stronach has stepped down as CEO of Magna. These days, he wants to “serve Austria”.

His money helps. Free drinks and snacks are offered to every visitor at every campaign stop. His talk is studded with anecdotes from his early life, of hunger, of his first visit back home in a beautiful car, and the fact that he is so important these days that he could afford to turn down an invitation from the Queen. His German is strongly coloured by English, but it’s still in good shape. He tells the story of the self-made man, describing his journey from Styrian toolmaker to Canadian dishwasher and from there to a billionaire.

But when he has to talk about politics, his German immediately becomes indecisive, questing, teeming with “thing” and “erm”. To the people in the room, that doesn’t matter. They’ve heard what they came to hear: values, respect, hard work, promotion – anyone can do it; the established parties have to be booted out of office; the system weakens the little guy and doesn’t protect him. As the meeting wraps up, Mr Everyman belts another song: Hand in hand.

Politics have barely been mentioned. Instead, Stronach has stressed at least four times in two hours just how much money he has donated. About what a good man he has been, and good to his workers too. Not like the “ones on top”. Frank Stronach is building his own Hall of Fame all by himself.

The Austro-Canadian lacks a clear agenda. His “Team Stronach”, though, is a threat to the ÖVP and FPÖ, because he is drawing off voters on the right. Since he started in 2012 to entice politicians away from the other parties and cobbled together his own group in the National Council in no time at all, the political elite has been running scared. With poll ratings around 10 per cent, his party is threatening to destabilise the customary balance of the ÖVP and SPÖ in Austria’s federal and state governments.

Threat to the ‘not-entirely-unsuccessful coalition’

March 3 is just the start of a major election year. Other state elections will follow, and in the autumn comes the general election. The not-entirely-unsuccessful coalition in Vienna is working, but they suffer from a poor image, despite Austria’s excellent economic data. Voters are fed up with the status quo. The Greens, who have come through many corruption scandals in recent months with clean hands, remain unpalatable for many traditionally conservative people who shy away from their agenda, while the right-wing FPÖ has still not lost the taint of the pariah left by its former head-honcho, Jörg Haider.

As for the fact that Stronach is a Canadian citizen who keeps his assets parked in Zug in Switzerland and has to fly out of Austria regularly and punctually for tax purposes – who cares? As for the fact that he, just a few days before two important state elections and nearly six months before the general election, still has no agenda beyond his three favourite concepts of “truth, transparency, fairness” – well, so what?

Stronach’s agenda boils down to what Stronach wants: a simpler tax system, less political patronage, less government, less influence for Brussels – but more power to someone like him, who has already proven that he can multiply money. And what goes for the economy goes for politics too. So he says...