Christian Social Party (Austria)
기독사회당 (오스트리아)
A Catholic-conservative party in the Austrian crown lands of Austria-Hungary and in the First Austrian Republic. Founded in the early 1890s under Karl Lueger, it rose rapidly to become one of the monarchy’s most important parties; in the First Republic it took part in every federal government until 1934, usually provided the chancellor from 1920 and the federal president from 1928. Its leaders prepared the transition to the authoritarian corporate state, after whose establishment the party dissolved in favour of the Fatherland Front in 1934. It is regarded as the forerunner of the Austrian People’s Party founded in 1945.
In depth
The Christian social movement’s roots go back to Sebastian Brunner’s Wiener Kirchenzeitung of 1848 and the Catholic journeymen’s associations. The 1869 demonstration against the arrest of Linz bishop Franz Joseph Rudigier is called the birth of the movement, and after the 1873 stock-market crash Karl von Vogelsang laid the foundations of Christian social reform. In 1888 Karl Lueger joined the Christian Social Association founded by Ludwig Psenner in 1887 and became its chairman.
Sources disagree on whether the party was born when the Christian Social Association ran as a party in the 1891 Reichsrat election or when several groups united in 1893, but agree that it was founded under Lueger’s leadership. Petty-bourgeois and clerical in outlook, it attracted farmers, the urban lower middle class, artisans and officials, using the lower clergy as its organisation. Moderate antisemitism was part of its value system, and until the 1890s Lueger’s electoral groupings bore names such as “Antisemites and Christian Socials”. It won a two-thirds majority on the Vienna city council in 1895, Lueger became mayor in 1897, and in 1907 the merger with the Catholic People’s Party made it the largest group in the Reichsrat. After Lueger’s death it fell into crisis and fell behind the Social Democrats in 1911; on 12 November 1918 it decided in favour of the republic.
Its defining figure in the First Republic was the priest Ignaz Seipel, party chairman from 1921 to 1930 and chancellor in 1922–1924 and 1926–1929. In 1927 it formed the Einheitsliste electoral alliance with Pan-German and National Socialist parties, and after the Palace of Justice fire that year it revived its contacts with the Heimwehr. From December 1928 to March 1938 the party’s Wilhelm Miklas was federal president.
In spring 1932 the former agriculture minister Engelbert Dollfuss became chancellor of a coalition including the Heimwehr’s political arm. When all three presidents of the National Council resigned on 4 March 1933, Dollfuss called it the “self-elimination of parliament” and began ruling by emergency decree. He built the Fatherland Front to gather all supporters of the government and, in his Trabrennplatz speech of 11 September 1933, openly called for abandoning the party state for an authoritarian corporate state. The corporate constitution, in which parties had no role, was proclaimed on 1 May 1934; the Christian Social parliamentary club met for the last time on 14 May, and on 28 September the federal party leadership declared that it had ceased to function as a party. Its chairmen were Lueger (1893–1910), Aloys von Liechtenstein (1910–1918), Johann Nepomuk Hauser (1918–1920), Leopold Kunschak (1920–1921), Seipel (1921–1930), Carl Vaugoin (1930–1934) and Emmerich Czermak (1934).