I like these compositions. I think they are balanced and nicely fit in their respective frames.
In other news you may have heard that our presidential election between the final two candidates, Norbert Hofer and Alexander Van der Bellen, has to be repeated. After Hofer lost, his party, the right-populist FPÖ, appealed, and they did so by submitting a 150 pages tome of collected “irregularities”. And formally they were right.
For instance, the law says that counting of postal ballots must not begin before Monday, 9 am. In some districts they began earlier due to the immense pressure of having to provide early results.
In some cases the election supervisor did not wait for the official witnesses but used public servants as witnesses. Again that’s against the rules.
In its opinion the constitutional court finally gave one reason that alone would have rectified the annulment, and that was the fact that from 1 pm on preliminary results had been given to political parties and to scientists for the purpose of making projections. That’s also against a strict reading of the rules.
The problem is, every past election of the last 20 years has been executed that way. It was the consensus. It was accepted by all parties, FPÖ included. Now they broke the consensus.
Every political party could have done the same thing after every past election. They didn’t because it was just the way things were done - and by and large it worked perfectly.
Now you may ask, why did FPÖ break the consensus? For their voters they insinuate electional fraud, but in all their 150 pages they did not find a single incident that would point to fraud.
Meanwhile Erich Neuwirth, a professor emeritus of statistics and computer science at the University of Vienna, has demonstrated conclusively on his blog, that all disputed districts statistically lie in the mainstream. If you assume a manipulation to the amount that would have changed the result, all of those districts would have to have been extreme outliers before the manipulation. In other words, the insinuation of fraud is pretty laughable when you look at the hard facts.
Furthermore, even the witnesses of FPÖ have all signed under oath that everything went according to rules. Some of them may even face persecution. Therefore again: why did they do that?
I think the answer is, that they feel they are very near to their goal. Europe is crumbling, the Brits are out (are they?), France might fall to Marine Le Pen (heaven forbid!) and in general the extreme right seems to advance everywhere. Having a partisan president who would call for early general elections in times of refugees and an economic crisis, that is just too good a chance to pass it. Therefore the heavy push, therefore this “nuclear” weapon that you can only use once.
Well, it’s our job to stand united and to just say no. Let’s re-elect Alexander Van der Bellen and let’s do it even more decisively. I think it’s time to set a signal, time to stem the brown tide. They may think so, but in reality their victory is not a historic necessity. It would rather be a freak aberration like the Nazi reign has been. Thank you, we’ve had that, no need to go that route one more time.