Page - 106 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

106 siting futurity tempted to consolidate the right by announcing that his party would not form part of next government if it should fall below its second-place status. While his promise did mobilize his voters as he had planned, it did not have the desired effect. Schüssel’s ÖVP came in third behind Haider’s FPÖ by the slimmest of mar- gins: both parties won 26.91% of the votes and 52 seats, with the FPÖ getting 415 more votes than the ÖVP in a country with a population at the time of over 8 million — 8,032,926 in the 2001 census, and the actual count was 1,244,087 votes to 1,243,672. After protracted negotiations among the three parties, the ÖVP and the FPÖ announced at the end of January 2000 that they would be forming the next government. This agreement saw the Freedomites share the government for the second time since be- ing founded in 1956.8 The agreement was met with great con- sternation by the EU, which issued a statement urging the Aus- trians to rethink such a step. When the coalition nonetheless went ahead on February 4, the EU-14 — the other EU member- states besides Austria — unanimously decided to suspend diplo- matic relations with the country. Only when Haider resigned as FPÖ leader and the coalition issued a declaration promising to abide by EU values, were the sanctions against Austria lifted in September 2000.9 The decision on the part of the Wiener Festwochen to solicit Schlingensief’s spectacle Please Love Austria for its 2000 pro- gram is thus to be understood as “a political statement by festival director, Luc Bondy, in response to the election outcome” (Var- ney 2010, 109). Building on his experience with the unemployed and the homeless, Schlingensief this time turned to the refugees that were the bane of the far-right’s existence, and whose pres- ence they continue to milk successfully to curry favor with sup- porters happy enough to blame the refugees for all the ills in the 8 The first time was in 1983 when a particularly liberal version of the party led by Norbert Steger was in a coalition with the SPÖ, which lasted until Jörg Haider took over the FPÖ leadership in 1986. 9 Fiddler’s reading of Jelinek’s 2000 Das Lebewohl: Ein Haider-Monologe [Farewell: A Haider Monologue], turns on the double meaning of resigna- tion (Fiddler 2018, 148–55).