{"id":198,"date":"2004-04-14T12:11:10","date_gmt":"2004-04-14T12:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maydanoz.arved.priv.at\/blog\/?p=198"},"modified":"2004-04-14T12:11:10","modified_gmt":"2004-04-14T12:11:10","slug":"ridiculous_elec","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/2004\/04\/14\/ridiculous_elec\/","title":{"rendered":"Ridiculous Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are currently located in Austria, you can’t escape the election campain for the federal president. The austrian federal president is often seen as a surrogate emperor. Although the federal president is formal the head of the state, he has nearly no political power in the constitution.
\nWith this background both candidates were selected by their parties because they don’t have a strong opinion and “somehow” can be elected by everyone.
\nThis makes it difficult to run a campain, because it is nearly impossible to talk about goals and the candidates opinion on a specific topics is relevant only for catching voters. Benita Ferrero Waldner writes a ridiculous weblog<\/a> and Heinz Fischer tries to impress the young voters with cheesy parties<\/a> like “Dancing for Democracy”
\nI often wonder how politicians with no own opinion can survive, as being politician implies that they have to make descions especially if they are holding an office. Both candidates of this election have made questionable decisions that did show that they are not able to run their office (“Causa Wiesenthal”, “Volxtheaterkarawane”), and i think that if they have been politicians in a larger country (like e.g. Germany) they would have been forced to retire years ago.
\nHowever I can’t really compare Germany and Austria, as in Germany the president is elected by the parliamentarians and not by the population, so the german president elections are not that ridiculous, as there is no need to launch guranteed content-free pseudo election campaigns.
\nWeblink: Hinter dem Laecheln<\/a>, why you should not vote for BFW.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you are currently located in Austria, you can’t escape the election campain for the federal president. The austrian federal president is often seen as a surrogate emperor. Although the federal president is formal the head of the state, he has nearly no political power in the constitution. With this background both candidates were selected … Continue reading “Ridiculous Elections”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arved.priv.at\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}