In Wealthy City, a Marxist Mayor Wins Over Voters

GRAZ, Austria – That the conservative mayor will win again and serve a fifth term, has been seen as an overlooked outcome in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, where locals are not uncommon encounter proud locals in traditional costumes. and dirndls.

Elke Kahr, the leader of the city’s Communist Party, is also convinced that she will again lose to the polished heir to a commercial dynasty who has led the city for 18 years.

So she was as surprised as the journalist told her in the election news last September: The Communists had won, and she would be the next mayor.

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

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

“Yes, 100 percent, I am a convinced Marxist,” Ms. Kahr said in her mayor’s office, flanked by used Ikea shelves that she replaced with stately furnishings. of his predecessor, Siegfried Nagl, of the Austrian People’s Party, or Ö.VP

Kahr, 60, is now trying to “redistribute wealth” to the extent that her role allows, she said.

But that doesn’t mean her Austrian Communist Party, or KPÖ., plans to overthrow the bourgeoisie or abolish the free market. Ms Kahr said her goal is to “relieve the problems of the people of our city as much as possible.”

To a visiting outsider, the city’s problems may not be immediately apparent.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger visits his hometown of Graz, he strolls the clean streets past affordable, modern apartment complexes.

But there are still people living in poverty, and many are struggling with rising prices and unstable wages.

And for nearly two decades, Ms. Kahr has, not without controversy, gone out of her own pocket to help people pay their unexpectedly high electricity bills or a new washing machine. She will listen to an issue, request a bank account and transfer an amount, usually capped at a few hundred euros.

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 offer has amounted to 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 am simply convinced that politicians earn too much.”

As mayor, her salary of around 120,000 euros after tax is more than four times the national average, and the 32,000 euros she keeps for herself is enough. She rode the city’s buses and trams, shopped at budget stores, and rented a modest apartment, full of books and records, where she lived with her partner, a retired KPÖ. official.

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

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

Graz, however, is an anomaly: With the party’s focus on housing, established Communists have sat on the City Council since the 1990s.

No one is as famous as Miss Kahr.

Supporters and critics alike describe her as approachable, agreeable, and a straight forward shooter. People often praise her for being “not like a politician”, but more like a social worker.

As mayor, operating in a coalition with democrats and the civil society, she now has more influence in directing policies in the direction she supports.

So far, that has included limits on residential wastewater and garbage charges as well as city-owned housing rent. She has made thousands of other residents eligible for an annual discount on public transportation tickets.

And she’s slashing marketing budgets for the entire city, as well as subsidies for all political parties.

Kurt Hohensinner, the new head of Ö.VP in Graz, dismissed these efforts as symbolic rather than substantive. Predicting how the city would develop under Ms. Kahr’s leadership, he said, “Graz will not be affected by communism, but from stalemate.”

Notably, Ms. Kahr has also canceled a number of prestigious projects, including a proposal led by Ö.VP to give Graz’s 300,000 residents a metro line of their own.

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

Ms. Kahr says that home is the place closest to her heart. It is also the problem that has built the reputation of the Communists in Graz.

Fearing annihilation at the end of the Cold War, they opened an emergency hotline for tenants, providing free legal advice on dubious leases, evictions and landlord failure. return the deposit.

The poor and the rich, the opposites, are called and spread by word of mouth: The Communists care. Ms. Kahr usually answers the phone.

As mayor, Ms. Kahr strives to be a familiar presence on the city’s streets.

Stepping off the bus in Triestersiedlung, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, defined by 1,200 subsidized apartments, Ms. Kahr commends the owner in her car, a rare Soviet Lada. production, then into the shady courtyard of a social housing complex.

The facades of the apartment buildings were freshly painted, and on this sunny afternoon low-income residents were sitting on their newly built balconies. It was the most luxurious private apartment in Graz lacked and the one that Ms. Kahr had offered to be a councilor.

As she distributed raised flower beds so residents could grow their own tomatoes and herbs, one of them approached and praised “Elke” for “still visiting us, now you are mayor.”

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

Adopted at birth, Ms. Kahr spent the first years of her life in a children’s home. Just shy of her 4th birthday, she was adopted. The story goes that she cheekily asked a visiting couple for a banana in their grocery bag; Admired by her shyness, the couple adopted her.

Her father, a welder, and her mother, a waitress who had just become a housewife, rented a shack in Triestersiedlung. They get water from the well and take care of chickens, ducks and rabbits. Their restroom is a motel.

Some of her playmates live in barracks left over from World War II and wear slippers in the snow.

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

However, she never felt like she lacked anything: She remembers gobbling up books in the housing project’s library. On Saturdays, when the whole family visited the public bath, little Elke enjoyed spending up to 30 minutes in the tub.

In her youth, she drove to rock concerts all over Europe (her favorite music, including socially conscious rap, “although Eminem, not so much”) and followed her mother. her gut, a peasant girl. Her biological father is a student from Iran.

The meeting wasn’t to foster a close relationship, but “to tell her that, whatever the reason for her decision, to me, it was the perfect thing,” Ms. Kahr said.

Reprimanded for “talking like a Communist” growing up, Kahr was 18 when she decided to find out why.

She looked up the address of the party in the directory and went to the local headquarters.

“She was a godsend,” said Ernest Kaltenegger, her mentor and predecessor as local head of the party. “Unlike other young people, who glow for a short time – she is very serious.”

When the bank branch she was working at closed when she was 24 years old, Mr. Kaltenegger convinced her to become the second employee of Graz’s KPÖ. During a six-month study in Moscow in 1989, she followed the heated debates there about reforms, and believed that “they would come to a dead end.”

Two years later, the Soviet Union dissolved.

Mrs. Kahr comforted her elderly comrades, and focused on her young son, Franz.

In the 1990s, Mr. Kaltenegger campaigned for the installation of bathrooms in all of Graz’s social housing apartments, and made the Communists a local political pillar. Then he moved to the state level on the condition that Ms. Kahr take over the Communist mantle in Graz.

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

But within five years, she had turned the Communists into the city’s second most powerful party. One likely factor in the party’s victory last year was growing resentment in Graz about a construction boom that was robbing the last of the undeveloped land. In a referendum held by the KPÖ in 2018, unusually high turnout effectively prevented an agricultural school’s land redistribution, a memorable party victory.

Often, criticism arises not from Ms. Kahr’s work, but from her unwavering mindset. For example, her admiration for the former Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic and non-aligned country run by a dictator, shows a “historic stubbornness,” says Christian Fleck, professor sociology at the University of Graz, said.

But voters don’t seem to care, to her Approved rating in June, stood at 65 percent.

As mayor, she continues to meet regularly with those in need, as she did as a councilor, and records more than 3,000 visits a year from single mothers, the homeless. occupations or those with precarious housing situations.

Dragging her cigarette, which she couldn’t give up, Mrs. Kahr pondered why Communism failed elsewhere.

“It just depends,” she said, “whether leaders live up to it.”