A law is needed! – Or would a little reason suffice?

The election campaign for the Austrian National Council has, in its final phase, reached a level of vulgarity that few would have anticipated. Probably not even those considered the architects of the ‘dirty campaign’. They were convinced the matter would not come to light, and thus, by discrediting opponents or rivals, they could secure power for the commissioning party. It is also noteworthy that for this smear campaign, the SPÖ did not commission its own party members, but mercenaries who had already worked for other parties. A mercenary goes to war for money, not for ideals. A commentary by Rainhard Kloucek.

Naturally, much is at stake in the election. Even if it was not entirely improbable that the SPÖ and ÖVP – albeit with reversed roles – would have formed a coalition again, had the results allowed it, the question remained whether it was arithmetically possible, and whether there might have been other coalition options that would have been better from a tactical power perspective. The dirty campaign has undoubtedly marked a low point in the relationship between Austria’s two perennial rulers, one that is likely to spell the end of governmental power for one of the partners. This is the most plausible scenario after all that has happened, provided another coalition can be formed. The loss of access to the trough is a threat to both parties.

But how can such smear campaigns be prevented in the future? It wouldn’t be Austria if the demand for a new law hadn’t been raised. The state must regulate everything. This mindset is deeply ingrained in the land of high bureaucracy.

This proposal is not intelligent, for it seeks to replace measure and objective, reason and decency, with regulation. However, the higher a state’s degree of regulation becomes, the more the natural sense of personal responsibility diminishes. The smear campaign ultimately turned against its creators.

Far more important would be a more direct link between elected representatives and their constituents in their electoral districts, thus strengthening the elements of personalised voting rights. The smear campaign was not invented by grassroots party officials, but by consultants and experts (whatever one understands these terms to mean today), for whom voters are not people with fundamental rights, but a manipulable mass.

A political representative who, in their constituency, is confronted weekly not only with their voters but also with their political rivals, who knows that their voters must also get along with the voters of their competitors in daily life, is not an anonymous face behind such a campaign. The direct feedback from the many individuals in the constituency would also serve as a feedback loop for decency.

The more laws we produce, the more the rule of law suffers. Felix Somary already recorded this wisdom in his 20 Social Laws of Inverse Proportions. Smear campaigns are not prevented by new laws (which, in turn, produce their own loopholes), but only by an increased measure of responsibility. The feedback from their voters is, for politicians, arguably the strictest measure.

The author is Secretary-General of the Paneuropean Movement Austria and a member of the Presidium of the Paneuropean Union