After 1,126 days, Nehammer himself drew the line. He was considered a man who was keen on balance, capable of compromise and pragmatic. For him it was about content and common goals.
“Honesty is not sexy in politics,” says Karl Nehammer regretfully about his announced farewell. But he is honest enough to say: This realpolitik insight did not come from him, but from one of his advisors. With many thanks to the team. Nehammer says thank you especially for the “honor” of being Chancellor of the Republic of Austria.
In September 2024, the ÖVP achieved its worst election result of all time, minus eleven percent, a landslide to 26 percent. The ÖVP was only the second strongest faction behind the partly right-wing extremist FPÖ.
Since then, Nehammer has only been an executive in the Chancellery – albeit on behalf of the Austrian Federal President, who gave him, Charles the Honest, the task of forming a government – and quite deliberately not the actual election winner Herbert Kickl, the frontman of the FPÖ. Nehammer as party leader of the once strong conservative Austrian people's party ÖVP – and then also as ÖVP Chancellor.
For a long time no one believed he could do that, especially not in the era of the brilliant ÖVP star Sebastian Kurz. But after its deep fall, Nehammer quickly became the only one on whom the influential ÖVP state governors, i.e. the prime ministers of the ÖVP-governed federal states, could agree.
Nehammer should do it, the conscientious man, a loyal party soldier, an officer in the reserves, someone who perseveres and pulls through if necessary. Someone who allowed himself to be held accountable as the ÖVP's wrecker after Kurz because no one else wanted to leave his warm place as state governor. Above all, the only influential ÖVP state governor, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, mother of Lower Austria, helped push the cause.
At the beginning, quiet in the third row
Lower Austria, the largest federal state in the Alpine republic, is also Nehammer's political home – a stable basis for an ÖVP party career. Nehammer started rather quietly in the third row: as head of the Lower Austrian ÖVP party academy, at the ÖVP employees' association as general secretary and regional leader.
It was only in 2017 that he was elected as a member of the Nationalrat, Austria's parliament. Nehammer's career start as a politician. He was ÖVP general secretary under Kurz, but was never part of Kurz's inner circle of confidants, the “Buberl party”, as many mocked at the time.
“Not with Kickl”
After the Ibiza scandal flushed the FPÖ out of the Kurz government and the FPÖ agitator Herbert Kickl from the Interior Minister's office, Nehammer became Interior Minister in the second Kurz government. Even then, he had to clear away the rubble that Interior Minister Kickl had left behind in office. Nehammer's genuine dislike of the FPÖ populist also dates back to this time.
But over many months of crisis this wore off. The corona pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the energy crisis, inflation – the ÖVP and the Greens ultimately became estranged. What was increasingly threatening for the ÖVP was the rise of the Corona denier Kickl and his FPÖ, which accelerated during the pandemic.
Migration became the most popular election campaign topic in Austria. Nehammer didn't seem to be the wrong person at Ballhausplatz either. The former Interior Minister was able to formulate this increasingly sharply: a tough stance against illegal migration, more Austrian culture. The party applauded its top candidate frenetically at the start of the election campaign at the beginning of last year.
There were just no noticeable increases in percentage points on the Sunday question – and in the end no election victory. There were occasional doubts about whether he was the right person. Sometimes driven by party nostalgia in memory of the ÖVP flights of fancy with Kurz. But: No danger for Nehammer, said the political advisors in Vienna: “Nobody wants the job right now.”
Now others have to do it. After 1126 days, Nehammer's time is over. But it is he himself who draws the line. And he quotes his father, who always told young Karl: “Don’t take yourself so seriously.”
Why did Nehammer throw down?
Die Frage der nächsten Tage bleibt: Warum hat er hingeworfen? Nehammer, the dutiful man who always wanted to be a “bulwark against the radicals”, as he emphasizes again at the very end. But which radicals does he mean? Those in other parties, or those in their own party, who want to imagine a coalition with the Kickl-FPÖ.
