Introduction: Confrontations with the Past

Summary

What happens when we forget to remember?

—Karen Frostig, The Vienna Project (2013–14)

ON MAY 24, 2016, SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENED. Austria was on the front pages of several British national newspapers, including the Times and the Guardian. The reason was the narrow victory of Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent candidate and former leader of Die Grünen (Austrian Green Party), against the Freiheitliche Partei Österreich (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party) candidate, Norbert Hofer, in the second round of the Austrian presidential election, held on May 22, 2016. Van der Bellen had won the election by the narrowest of margins, by only 30,863 votes, getting 50.3 percent of the total vote, with Hofer polling at 49.7 percent. The election was effectively decided by the 759.968 postal voters, making up almost 14 percent of the electorate, whose votes were counted on the day after the Sunday, May 22, election. For an Austrian presidential election to be decided by postal votes in this way was a highly unusual occurrence. Ordinarily, the winning candidate is able to gain enough of a majority for the postal vote count on the following day to be largely a formality, with the winner announced already on the Sunday evening. On this occasion, the end of the election day saw Hofer lead at 51.9 percent (with Van der Bellen at 48.1 percent), while pollsters from the SORA Institute for Social Research and Consulting predicted the final result (including postal votes), to stand at circa 50 percent and 50 percent for the respective candidates, with everything still to play for. The presidential election saw the candidates of the ruling political parties, the Social Democratic Party of Austria and the Austrian People's Party, eliminated in the first round, with Norbert Hofer, the farright Austrian Freedom Party candidate, winning this first heat with 35,1 percent of the votes. It was an election that polarized the country, rural against urban areas, male voters against female voters, young against old, and divided those communities where the vote reflected the national picture of a near fifty-fifty split of votes for the two candidates.