The society of error in the SPÖ municipality has normally been underdeveloped. This was obvious in addressing the scandal encompassing the North Clinic. The clinic – now: “Klinik Floridsdorf” – was inaugurated in 2019 – with 3 several years of delay and additional costs of 400 million euros. In a report, the Court docket of Auditors criticized the deficiency of know-how in the Viennese medical center affiliation for running the key job. But the metropolis observed no wrongdoing. In his testimony right before the investigative commission of the metropolis council in 2018, Michael Ludwig reported he was certain “that with the Northern Medical center we have constructed the finest and most present day healthcare facility in Europe for the Viennese”.
Criticism of the city’s health services, which are also an critical pillar of general public solutions, is unwanted, especially if it arrives from within. In the latest months, doctors from the Favoriten, Floridsdorf and Ottakring clinics have complained of “unacceptable circumstances” in their hospitals. The town explained succinctly that these were being “short-term and not everlasting predicaments”.
The city hall has a large dollars fund to advertise its do the job. The town of Vienna is one particular of the most significant advertisers in the state and invests extra cash in Television set commercials, Fb advertisements, and print ads than all other federal states blended. At the starting of his tenure, Ludwig promised a “new transparent thought for the facts policy of the town of Vienna”. If there is a principle someplace, it has not been carried out. Pretty the opposite: There is a trick to ad spend, as profil-faktiv shown in June. City councilor Peter Hanke, for illustration, claimed the city’s promoting spending plan amounted to € 20.3 million in 2021 and has therefore shrunk by approximately € 4 million.
The metropolis, in reality, has put in almost 32 million euros on promoting and interaction actions, as can be observed from the report on transparency on metropolis conversation that was printed for the to start with time.
The generous promotion budgets of Wiener Stadtwerke and Wien Keeping – which operate municipal businesses this kind of as Wiener Messe, Wiener Stadthalle, Hafen Wien, and Vereinigte Bühnen – are not even involved. The city of Vienna generously distributes subsidies also via the advertising and marketing budgets of municipal providers. For example, Wien Energie has been the main sponsor of SK Rapid Vienna for years and will continue to be so as long as the city corridor would like it. It goes without saying that Stadtwerke and Wien Holding also generously sponsor the SPÖ Vienna Danube Island Festival, in addition to the subsidies that the town alone grants.
Criticism of the town, its administration or administration is often discredited by the town corridor as “Vienna bashing”. Religion in one’s possess infallibility is great, other individuals are usually to blame. Also this time: Michael Ludwig accused not the management but the federal federal government of the precarious circumstance of Wien Energie, which had not prepared a protective shield in time. Ludwig identified as the push meeting in which the Chancellor and the Minister of Finance informed of the bank loan of two billion euros for Vienna “a staging”. The mayor was not able to recognize a “discount” in the functions encompassing the municipal energy generator – and was publicly amazed by their “fantastic political resonance”.
Michael Ludwig’s behavior is exemplary for the age of pink conceit in Vienna. “We have always been on the suitable facet of history, of democracy”, he feels himself in all the excellent social democratic celebrations. And it is true. For additional than 100 many years, Social Democracy has been dependable for the political fortunes of the city – except for the bitter many years of Austro-fascism, when the bash was banned, and Countrywide Socialism’s reign of terror. The “Red Vienna” commenced in 1919 and was an island of rural and conservative Austria and evidence of the viability of the social democratic notion. As early as 1927, cautiously selected worldwide guests were being staying introduced to Vienna as component of an formal community stop by software: from neighborhood setting up to community setting up, from Montessori kindergarten to employees ‘library, from central kitchen area to mothers’ councils of the city center.
The Social Democratic elite observed themselves in the vanguard. Its mission: to educate a improved and additional supportive man or woman to elevate the worker to humanistic schooling and lifestyle, to new new music, to modern day painting and to precious literature. It was a political hard work, but also a pedagogical one particular. The courageous Social Democrat went to the theater and not to the cinema he was an lively athlete and not a passive spectator he attended the workers’ university and was a regular visitor of lectures at adult schooling facilities. He has go through the proper publications. He went so significantly as to remove Karl May well, Hedwig Courths-Mahler and Edgar Wallace in workers’ libraries, even however they were being the most well known authors. A beer tax has been released to minimize alcoholic beverages use. The theater was taxed considerably less than the cinema. The late present-day historian Siegfried Mattl named “Red Vienna” “a public moral establishment”.
All this was no for a longer period conceivable when almost everything resumed immediately after the Second World War. But the perception remained that social democracy understands what is fantastic for the people today.
Even in the Second Republic, Vienna remained a perfectly-managed and visionary metropolis. The Donauinsel recreation area was created from the prophecies of doom by the opposition of ÖVP and FPÖ in the city corridor and Vienna was founded as a town of congresses. Opposite to the international pattern, the municipal properties owned by the metropolis have not been privatized, the unique municipal corporations have been closed and most have been spun off to Wien Holding.
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