Nathan News

GRAZ, Austria – That the conservative mayor wins yet again and serves a fifth term was seen as a foregone conclusion in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, a place where it’s not uncommon to meet local residents proudly dressed in traditional lederhosen and dirndls.

Elke Kahr, the city’s Communist Party leader, was also confident she would lose again to the elegant heir to a trading dynasty who had ruled the city for 18 years.

She was therefore as surprised as the journalist who told her about the electoral news last September: the Communists had emerged victorious, and she would be the next mayor.

“He was completely baffled – and I thought it was a joke,” Ms Kahr recalled of her election night conversation with the City Hall reporter.

Newspapers across Europe began calling the city “Leningraz”, a nickname that the new mayor smiled at.

“Yes, 100% I am a convinced Marxist,” Ms Kahr said in her mayoral office, flanked by the used Ikea shelves with which she moved the stately furniture of her predecessor, Siegfried Nagl, of the Austrian People’s Party, or Ö.VP

Ms Kahr, 60, is now trying to “redistribute the wealth” as much as her role allows, she said.

But that does not mean that his Communist Party of Austria, or KPÖ., plans to dispossess the bourgeoisie or abolish the free market. Ms Kahr said her aim was “to ease the problems of the people of our city as much as possible”.

To a visiting foreigner, the city’s problems may not be immediately obvious.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger visits his hometown of Graz, he walks through clean streets past modern, affordable apartment buildings.

But there are pockets of poverty and many people are struggling with rising prices and stagnating wages.

And for nearly two decades, Ms Kahr, not without controversy, dipped into her own pocket to help people pay for surprisingly high electricity bills or a new washing machine. She will listen to a problem, ask for a bank account and transfer money, usually capped at a few hundred dollars.

During her political career, she gave away about three-quarters of her after-tax salary. Since becoming a city councilor in 2005, Ms. Kahr’s donations have totaled more than one million euros, or about $1,020,000.

Political opponents have accused her of buying votes, but “they are free to do the same”, Ms Kahr noted. “Besides, it’s not charity,” she added. “I’m just convinced that politicians earn too much.”

As mayor, her salary of around €120,000 after tax is more than four times the national average, and the €32,000 she keeps for herself is enough. She takes the city’s buses and trams, shops in cheap shops and rents a modest apartment, overflowing with books and records, where she lives with her partner, a retired KPÖ. official.

Austria has a long tradition of socialism and has created an extensive welfare system. Health care is universal and universities are free.

But voters have largely shunned the Communist Party since Austrians had a front-row seat when the Soviet Union violently crushed a popular uprising in neighboring Hungary in 1956. The KPÖ. has not won a seat in the national parliament in any election held since.

Graz, however, has been an anomaly: with the party’s focus on housing, charismatic communists have sat on the city council since the 1990s.

None have been as popular as Ms. Kahr.

Fans and critics alike describe her as approachable, pleasant, and outspoken. Voters often compliment her for “not being like a politician”, but more like a social worker.

As mayor, governing in a coalition with the Social Democrats and the Greens, she now has more influence to steer policies in the directions she favors.

So far, that has included caps on sewer and residential waste fees as well as rents in city-owned housing. It has enabled thousands of additional residents to benefit from greatly reduced annual public transport passes.

And she cut the marketing budget for the whole city, as well as the subsidies for all the political parties.

Kurt Hohensinner, the new head of the Ö.VP in Graz, described these efforts as more symbolic than substantial. Predicting how the city would fare under Mrs Kahr’s leadership, he said: “Graz will not suffer from communism, but from inaction.

Notably, Ms Kahr has also canceled several high-profile projects, including an Ö.VP-led proposal to give Graz’s 300,000 residents their own metro line.

Instead, the city will soon have a new office for social and housing services and more subsidized apartments.

Housing, says Ms. Kahr, is most important to her. It is also the question that built the brand of the communists in Graz.

Fearing annihilation at the end of the Cold War, they opened an emergency tenant hotline, giving free legal advice on dodgy tenancies, impending evictions and landlords’ failure to return security deposits.

Poor and rich, left and right, called, and word of mouth spreads: Communists care. Often Mrs. Kahr would answer the phone.

As mayor, Ms. Kahr tries to be a familiar presence on the city streets.

Hopping off the bus in Triestersiedlung, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods defined by its 1,200 subsidized apartments, Ms Kahr praised the owner for his car, a rare Soviet-made Lada, then headed for the shaded courtyard of a social housing building.

The facades of apartment buildings were freshly painted, and on this sunny afternoon, its low-income residents were lounging on their newly constructed balconies. It’s a luxury that most private apartments in Graz lack and that Ms Kahr asked for as a consultant.

As she handed out raised flower beds for residents to grow their own tomatoes and herbs, one approached and praised ‘Elke’ for ‘always coming to visit, now that you are mayor”.

Mrs. Kahr reminded the woman that she too grew up there.

Given up for adoption at birth, Mrs. Kahr spent the first years of her life in a children’s home. Just before her 4th birthday, she was adopted. The story goes that she cheekily asked a couple of visitors for a banana that came out of their grocery bag; impressed by the little girl’s lack of shyness, the couple adopt her.

Her father, a welder, and her mother, a waitress turned housewife, rented a cabin in Triestersiedlung. They went to draw water from a well and looked after chickens, ducks and rabbits. Their toilets were an addiction.

Some of his playmates lived in barracks left over from World War II and trudged through the snow in sandals.

“If you grow up in this social environment, you can only seek a socially just world,” Ms Kahr said.

However, she never felt that she lacked something: she remembered having devoured the books of the library of the city. On Saturdays, when the family visited the bathhouse, little Elke would splurge by limiting her time in the tub to 30 minutes.

As a young adult, she drove to rock concerts across Europe (she likes most music, she said, including socially conscious rap, “although Eminem, not so much “) and reunited with his biological mother, a farmer. Her biological father was an Iranian student.

The meeting was not intended to create a connection, but “to tell him that, whatever the reasons for his decision, for me it was perfect,” Ms. Kahr said.

Scolded for ‘talking like a communist’ growing up, Ms Kahr was 18 when she set out to find out why.

She looked up the party’s address in the phone book and walked to the local headquarters.

“She was a godsend,” said Ernest Kaltenegger, her mentor and predecessor as local party leader. “Not like other young people who shine for a little while – she was serious.”

When the bank branch she worked at closed at the age of 24, Mr Kaltenegger persuaded her to become the second employee of the KPÖ in Graz. During a six-month study in Moscow in 1989, she followed the heated debates there on reform, and believed that “they would turn the corner”.

Two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.

Ms. Kahr consoled her older comrades and focused on her young son, Franz.

In the 1990s, Mr Kaltenegger campaigned to install bathrooms in all social housing in Graz and made communists a local political mainstay. It then moved to state level on the condition that Ms Kahr take up the communist torch in Graz.

She did and got off to a stumbling start. At the head of the party in the 2008 elections, she lost half of her voters.

But within five years, it had made the Communists the second strongest party in the city. A likely factor in the party’s victory last year was growing dissatisfaction in Graz with a building boom that was grabbing up the last remaining plots of undeveloped land. In a referendum organized by the KPÖ in 2018, an unusually high turnout effectively blocked the rezoning of land for an agricultural school, a momentous victory for the party.

Often, criticism stems not from Ms. Kahr’s work, but from her unabashed embrace of ideology. For example, his admiration for the former Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic, non-aligned state ruled by a dictator, shows “historical stubbornness”, said Christian Fleck, professor of sociology at the University of Graz.

But voters don’t seem to care, with his approval rating in June standing at 65%.

As mayor, she continues to meet people who need help on a regular basis, as she did when she was a councilor and recorded more than 3,000 visits a year from single mothers, unemployed people or people in difficulty. precarious housing.

Dragging a cigarette, a vice she cannot give up, Ms Kahr reflected on why communism has failed elsewhere.

“It just depends,” she said, “if the leaders also live off of it.”