Wolfgang Schüssel
Wolfgang Schüssel was chancellor of Austria from 2000 to 2007, the People's Party leader who came third in the election of October 1999, behind Haider's Freedom Party by a few hundred votes, and formed a government with it in February 2000, the first in Western Europe with a far-right party since 1945, for which the other fourteen members of the European Union froze bilateral relations with Austria for seven months until three wise men reported that the government was behaving and the sanctions were doing harm, and the crowds on the Ballhausplatz on the night of the swearing-in made the ministers enter through an underground passage. The gamble worked, in that the Freedom Party tore itself apart in office, lost two-thirds of its vote at the election of 2002 that gave his party forty-two per cent, its best since 1966, and split in 2005. The government meanwhile cut the deficit to zero, the zero deficit being his phrase. It raised the pension age, reformed the universities, and bought the Eurofighter aircraft whose commissions became the country's longest scandal. It settled with the Nazi-era forced labourers and the heirs of the aryanised property through funds of half a billion euros. He was born in Vienna in 1945, studied law, and ran the party's business wing. He was economics minister from 1989 and foreign minister and vice-chancellor from 1995. He took the party in 1995 with the bow tie and the cool manner the cartoonists used. The Union's sanctions were the making of him at home, and the Austrian presidency of the Union in 2006, with the Union's constitution dead and the enlargement digested, was the making of him abroad. The election of October 2006 put the Social Democrats first by a point and he went into the grand coalition as vice-chancellor designate and then, in January 2007, out. He handed the party to Molterer. The years since have been the parliamentary inquiries into the Eurofighter and the BUWOG privatisation of 2004, in which his finance minister Grasser was convicted in 2020 of taking a cut. There was a seat on the board of the Russian oil company Lukoil that he kept until March 2022, when the invasion made it impossible. He has said the coalition of 2000 was a democratic necessity. The Freedom Party, which came first in 2024, has been the argument against.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: chancellor, politician
