Austrians protest over budget cuts

Schuessel dismissed weekend election results as unimportant

VIENNA, Austria -- Traffic in Vienna and other Austrian cities has been disrupted at the start of a day of national protests over the centre-right government's budget cuts.

Police said there were occasional scuffles as they cleared major intersections in the capital but no arrests were reported.

Around 185,000 high-school pupils face a day without lessons as teachers stage warning strikes and trade unions plan a human chain around parliament for later in the day.

The protests are taking place a day before parliament is due to approve a budget which aims to eliminate the budget deficit within two years.

Measures include cuts in unemployment benefit, increased prescription charges and the introduction of tuition fees for university students.

Anger over budget cuts and tax increases was highlighted as the cause of a slight loss for Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's People's Party in provincial elections at the weekend.

The Social Democrats' national leader Alfred Gusenbauer said the election result in Burgenland, Austria's poorest region, also represented a rejection of the policies of the Schuessel government.

"National politics clearly played an important role," he told ORF radio.

But Schuessel said the results, in which both the far-right Freedom Party and his own conservatives lost ground, were not important.

Political analysts said the outcome reflected the Freedom Party's problems in maintaining support while adjusting to the responsibilities of government, but it was unlikely to have a short-term impact on the coalition.

The Freedom Party suffered its second electoral setback in six weeks in Burgenland, falling to a 12.6 percent share of the vote from 14.6 percent in 1996 and from the 21 percent it won in Burgenland in the October 1999 general election.

The People's Party lost slightly less than one percentage point in the election.

Noting that the vote had been brought forward at the insistence of the conservatives and the Freedom Party because of a local banking scandal they thought would damage the province's dominant Social Democrats, Schuessel said: "Voters apparently do not want early elections. That is a lesson which I think should be borne in mind in future."

This appeared to be an oblique reference to periodic threats from former Freedom Party leader Joerg Haider to abandon the 10-month-old national coalition.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Austrian election blow for far-right party
December 3, 2000

Austrian government

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