Bruno Kreisky
Bruno Kreisky was chancellor of Austria from 1970 to 1983, thirteen years, the longest of the republic, the Socialist who won an absolute majority three times in a Catholic country, in 1971, 1975 and 1979, and governed alone. He was the sun king of the Vienna papers who made the Second Republic's welfare state. There was the forty-hour week, the four weeks' holiday, the free schoolbooks and school buses, the university fees abolished, the abortion law of 1975, and the army service cut to six months. There were the nationalised industries kept running on borrowed money through the oil shocks, since a few billion schillings of debt, he said, gave him fewer sleepless nights than a few hundred thousand unemployed. There was the foreign policy of a neutral state that talked to everyone, the first Western leader to receive Arafat, the host of the UN city in Vienna and the Vienna talks, the sponsor of Brandt's Ostpolitik and of the Socialist International's turn to the third world. He was born in Vienna in 1911 into a Jewish textile family, joined the Socialist youth, was jailed for fifteen months in 1935 by the Dollfuss regime and again by the Nazis in 1938, and spent the war in Sweden, where he knew Brandt and the Swedish Social Democrats and learned what a welfare state looked like. Twenty-one of his relatives died in the camps. He was the state secretary who negotiated the State Treaty of 1955 that ended the occupation and made Austria neutral. He was foreign minister from 1959 to 1966, and the party's leader from 1967. He took it from opposition to the chancellery in three years. The Jewish chancellor who kept four former Nazis in his first cabinet, who fought Simon Wiesenthal in the courts for a decade over the past of his coalition partner and his own ministers, and who said that Zionism was not his concern and that the Israelis had learned nothing, was the contradiction the country lived with. The Israelis called him the Jewish anti-Semite and the Arabs the honest broker. The terrorist seizure of the Jewish transit camp at Marchegg in 1973, which he ended by closing the camp, was the test he was said to have failed. He lost the majority in 1983, refused to govern in coalition and resigned. He died in Vienna in July 1990, the year the republic he had made began to argue about what it had been.
- Lived: 1911 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: chancellor, politician
