Austria: biggest post-war demo says Stop Haider!
[ASt, Vienna, 22 February]
The demonstration on 19 February in Vienna was the biggest anti-government mobilisation in Austria's post-war history. Five marches from around the city culminated in a mass rally of 250,000 on the historic Heldenplatz.
This was the first anti-Haider demo to be officially supported by the trade unions and it was trade union banners that dominated the scene. Amongst the most prominent were the railway and local government workers who are likely to be the targets of the right wing government's privatisation and social service cuts policies.
The ASt contingent on Saturday was full of red flags, banners and dozens of red placards. A series of them expressed the central demand of the ASt in the present situation: GENERAL STRIKE!
Alongside the union contingents were thousands from the immigrant communities who are threatened by Haider's openly racist campaigning as well as delegations from Germany, Italy, Belgium, France and Britain.
Although on a different scale, a one-day school strike and a demonstration by 10,000 school students the previous day, underlined the
depth of political mobilisation aroused by the formation of the coalition.
The Gruppe ArbeiterInnenstandpunkt (ASt) - Austrian section of the LRCI - and the independent youth organisation REVOLUTION played an active role in the mass demonstrations.
REVOLUTION organised a strike at one school in Vienna which then went on to pull out other schools. REVOLUTION stressed the necessity to link the struggle of the school students with the unions and to broaden the strike movement.
Speaking at a meeting on Sunday a representative of the Austrian section of the LRCI drew the most important lesson from the weekend:
"A new chapter has opened in the class struggle in this country. The long years of "social partnership" and institutional class collaboration have come to an end. Austrian capital has adopted a strategy of direct confrontation and already the response of the working class and the Left has shaken Austria to its roots. The task now is to politicise this movement, campaign against the idea that there can be any going back The workers' movement must use its own economic and political power to drive the government from office and set Austria, and all of Europe, on the road to socialist revolution".
