This episode explores the recent national elections in Austria and the victory of a radical right-wing party. How is this development situated within the EU’s broader shift to the right? And what explains the decline of the traditional center-right and the Social Democrats? Listen to hear about the issues that dominated public discourse during the campaign and about the current state of democracy in Austria.
Guest featured in this episode:
Raimund Löw is a historian turned journalist who writes for the Vienna weekly, Falter. He has carried out historical research at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the history of the labor movement in Austria, as well as at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam. Löw was a correspondent, and later bureau chief, of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF, stationed in Moscow, then Washington, D.C., followed by Brussels, and most recently in Beijing. He has also written extensively on international affairs, contemporary history, and politics in Le Monde Diplomatique and the Washington Post, for example, and interviewed several world leaders, such as Bill Clinton, Gorbachev, Andrei Sakharov, and Kofi Annan, over the course of his distinguished career.
With several books in German on the European Union, on U.S. politics, and two books on China, as the rising global power, Löw has received recognition as the Foreign Policy Journalist of the Year in 2017.
