Franz Vranitzky
Franz Vranitzky was chancellor of Austria from 1986 to 1997, the banker whom the Socialists made finance minister in 1984 and chancellor two years later when Sinowatz resigned over the election of Kurt Waldheim to the presidency with his war record unexplained. He governed the eleven years of the grand coalition with the People's Party that took the country into the European Union on 1 January 1995 after a referendum of two-thirds. It sold the nationalised steel and oil companies that Kreisky had kept, and cut the deficit for Maastricht. It answered the Waldheim affair and the rise of Haider's Freedom Party with the first admission by an Austrian chancellor, in the parliament in July 1991 and in Jerusalem in 1993, that Austrians had been perpetrators and not only the first victims of Hitler, which the state doctrine since 1945 had held. He broke the coalition with Haider's party in 1986 on the day Haider took it. He kept the Freedom Party out for the rest of his time while it grew from five per cent to twenty-two. He was born in Vienna in 1937, the son of a foundry worker, studied economics at the Vienna business school, and played basketball for the national team. He worked at the central bank and as adviser to the finance minister Androsch in the 1970s. He ran the Creditanstalt and then the Länderbank, the man in the good suit whom the party's left never quite took for one of theirs and the country took for its manager. The eleven years were also the Lucona affair, in which a party financier had sunk a ship for the insurance and ministers had covered for him. There were the letter bombs of the 1990s, the Bosnian refugees taken in, the neutrality kept while the Union's foreign policy was joined, and the privatisations that the party's unions accepted from him because he was not one of them. He handed the chancellery and the party to Klima in January 1997 on his own schedule. He said that the job had been done. He has spent the years since on boards, on the OSCE's mission to Albania in 1997, and as the party's elder, warning it in 2000 and 2017 and 2025 against what it did anyway, which was to let the Freedom Party in.
- Lived: 1937 CE – ?
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: chancellor, banker, politician
