Viktor Klima
| Viktor Klima | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| 20th Chancellor of Austria | |
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In office 28 January 1997 – 4 February 2000 |
|
| President | Thomas Klestil |
| Deputy | Wolfgang Schüssel |
| Preceded by | Franz Vranitzky |
| Succeeded by | Wolfgang Schüssel |
| Personal details | |
| Born |
4 June 1947 Schwechat, Lower Austria |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Political party | Social Democratic Party of Austria |
| Religion | Roman Catholicism |
| Signature |  |
Viktor Klima (born 4 June 1947) is an Austrian Social Democrat politician and businessman. He was chancellor of Austria from 1997 to 2000.
Born in Schwechat, Lower Austria, Klima started working for the then state-owned OMV oil company in 1969 and remained with the company up to the beginning of his political career in 1992, in his later years serving as a member of their management board.
Although Klima was then unknown to the majority of Austrians, in 1992 Chancellor Franz Vranitzky made him Minister of Transportation and Nationalised Industry, a position Klima held till 1996, when he became Minister of Finance for a year.
In 1997, upon Vranitzky's resignation, Klima was elected chairman of the Social Democratic party and was sworn in as Chancellor of Austria, having renewed the grand coalition between his own party (Social Democratic Party of Austria, SPÖ) and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), with Wolfgang Schüssel serving as his vice chancellor.
Influenced by the "Third Way" strategy of other European leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, under Klima's chairmanship the Social Democrats played down their allegiance to Marxism and thus to their own political roots and very clearly continued their move from the political left towards the centre, frequently using spin doctors and embracing populism as a political strategy.
For example, further privatizations took place, and several public services that had been subsumed under the policies of the welfare state were tentatively reduced. As a consequence, a high percentage of the party's traditional working-class clientele, dissatisfied with Klima and his party, diverted their support to Jörg Haider's populist far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). However, just as his predecessor Vranitzky, Klima repeatedly and publicly announced that under no circumstances was he prepared to enter into a coalition with Haider's party.
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