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Information from the CIA Factbook 1999 & the Library of Congress Edited by Richard Jaklitsch Page 2 |
Government & Politics
Between the end of World War II and the late 1980s, when some new trends became evident, Austria's political system seemed stable and unchangeable. Most political scientists considered Austria a classic case of constitutional democracy, that is, a political system in which cohesive social groups are closely identified with political parties. According to this theory, Austrian politics, business, and society in general were decisively shaped by the influence of three major social camps, or subcultures (Lager)--the socialist, the Catholicconservative , and the German-nationalist.
The most important factors in determining to which subculture a person belonged were geographic location (rural or urban), socioeconomic status, and professional occupation. The socialist camp had its basis in the urban working class of Vienna and other cities and in the intellectual class. The Catholic-conservative camp had its traditional base in the small towns and farming communities of Austria and was almost exclusively Roman Catholic. The German-nationalist camp was smaller than the other two subcultures and was founded on the enthusiasm for union with Germany that was prevalent during the years of the First Republic (1918-38). A high percentage of its members came from whitecollar professions.
Austria's subcultures provided their members with a selfcontained milieu in which to pursue their lives and a variety of occupations. In addition to the political parties aligned with the Lager, each camp featured professional and trade organizations that played an important role in party politics and in society as well.
This traditional system has continued into the 1990s. In 1993, in the socialist camp, the key organizations affiliated with the SPÖ were the Group of Socialist Trade Unionists (Fraktion Sozialistischer Gewerkschaftler--FSG), the Free Business Association of Austria (Freier Wirtschaftsverband Österreichs--FWB), and the SPÖ Farmers (SPÖ-Bauern). In the Catholic-conservative camp, the chief organizations of the ÖVP were the League of Austrian Workers and Salaried Employees (Österreichischer Arbeiter- und Angestelltenbund--ÖAAB), the League of Austrian Business (Österreichischer Wirtschaftsbund-- ÖWB), and the League of Austrian Farmers (Österreichischer Bauernbund--ÖBB). The German-nationalist camp, which is represented by the FPÖ, had only one auxiliary organization of note as of 1993, the Circle of Free Business Persons (Ring Freiheitlicher Wirtschaftstreibender--RFW).
A key source of influence for the professional and trade organizations is their control of the chambers of agriculture, commerce, and labor. In the Austrian corporatist system, the chambers are assigned responsibility for implementing certain aspects of economic laws and regulations. Moreover, membership in the chambers is obligatory for persons employed in a wide range of occupations. Thus, the professional and trade organizations and the chambers are assured a large amount of influence in the public realm. The ÖVP dominates the Chamber of Agriculture through the ÖAAB and the Chamber of Commerce through the ÖWB. The SPÖ has a controlling influence in the Chamber of Labor through the FSG.
The Austrian system of interests was dominated by the socialist and Catholic-conservative camps for virtually the entire postwar period. During the early years of the Second Republic, politicians of the SPÖ and ÖVP were adamant about the need for political consensus and compromise. One overriding reason for the emergence of a system designed to avoid conflict was the negative experience of the 1930s, when the political parties clashed so vehemently that they ended up fighting a short civil war in 1934. During the period of Nazi rule, many Austrian politicians found themselves imprisoned alongside their political opponents. This shared fate convinced the country's political elite of the imperative for consensus in postwar Austria. From 1945 to 1966, the country was ruled by the grand coalition formed by the ÖVP and the SPÖ, an astonishing duration of a series of governments composed of Austria's two main political competitors. The cumulative effect of a variety of changes in Austrian society in the postwar era has led many political scientists to conclude that the strength of the political camps, or Lager, has weakened significantly. A major shift in the way people earn their livelihood--a decline in farming and manufacturing and a growth in the services sector--has weakened the hold of the Lager on voters. An increasingly secularized society has lessened the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. An increased sense of Austria's existence as a nation (up from less than 50 percent in the mid-1960s to 74 percent in one poll in 1990) has reduced the political potency of pan-Germanism. And the growth of the suburbs and the transformation of rural areas by tourism have reduced the homogeneity of traditional SPÖ and ÖVP enclaves.
The weakened hold of the Lager on Austrian society and politics has created opportunities for smaller parties. A 1990 poll showed that only 50 percent of respondents claimed some kind of identification with a political party; a mere 20 percent claimed strong identification. In the 1960s and 1970s, similar polls had shown that more than 30 percent of Austrians identified closely with a party. Services-sector, or white-collar, employees were often part of a block of so-called floating voters who did not identify with a particular party. This block can be the key to an electoral victory for the party that wins its votes.
The propensity toward what political scientists call electoral dealignment, that is, the breakdown of long-standing voter loyalties, was bound to have effects on Austrian voting behavior, and by 1986 the first signs of change were evident. In the parliamentary election of that year, the combined vote for the ÖVP and SPÖ fell to 84 percent, the first time since 1962 that it had dropped below 90 percent (see table 13, Appendix). The party benefiting the most from the losses by the major parties was the FPÖ, which doubled its vote. Moreover, for the first time ever, members of the Green political movement entered parliament.
The trend away from the dominance of the Lager system continued in the next parliamentary election in 1990, but this time it was the ÖVP alone that bore the brunt. Its share of the vote declined from 41.3 to 32.1 percent, a massive loss by the standard of Austria's ultrastable political system. The FPÖ had another striking success, and the environmentalists lost some votes but gained two seats in the Nationalrat.
Although the 1990 election did not lead to a change in government (because the ÖVP and SPÖ had renewed their grand coalition in 1987), it nevertheless marked a watershed in Austrian political history. For the first time in the Second Republic, the status of the ÖVP as a major party was placed in doubt. Whereas in the 1986 election the ÖVP received only 88,000 fewer votes than the SPÖ, in 1990 the difference ballooned to more than 500,000. Under its colorful leader, Jörg Haider, the FPÖ was changing the Austrian party system from one dominated by two parties to one with multiparty possibilities.
The Social Democratic Party of Austria
The Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs--SPÖ), until 1991 known as the Socialist Party of Austria (Sozialistische Partei Österreichs--SPÖ), has its roots in the original Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei--SDAP), founded in 1889 by Viktor Adler, a young doctor. The SDAP supported revisionist Marxism and the use of democratic methods to establish workingclass rule in a democratic government. The SDAP was responsible for pushing through universal voting rights for men in 1905 and for extending the same for women in 1919. From 1934 to 1945, during the regimes of Engelbert Dollfuss (1932-34) and Kurt von Schuschnigg (1934-38) and the takeover by the Nazis, the SDAP was outlawed. In 1945 it was reconstituted as the Socialist Party of Austria. In 1991 the party readopted the designation "Social Democratic."
Moderates such as Karl Renner and Adolf Schärf, each of whom eventually served as president of the Second Republic, led the postwar party (see table 14, Appendix). Their primary interests lay in increasing SPÖ power in the coalition government rather than in fostering Marxism. Between 1945 and 1957, the party supported democratic practices and intraparty cooperation, programs for higher wages and lower food prices, and increased government spending on social programs.
The election of Bruno Pittermann as party chairman in 1957 marked the beginning of major policy changes. The party had a strong following among industrial workers, but party officials wanted to expand SPÖ membership to the middle class and whitecollar workers and to soften the party's anticlerical position in order to become acceptable to Roman Catholics. These changes were expressed in a new party program adopted in 1958. The program claimed that the SPÖ was "the party of all those who work for a living," and it stated the party's opposition to communism and fascism.
The late 1960s brought more changes in party doctrine. A new economic program in 1967 constituted a shift from concern for the distribution of wealth to concern for economic growth, including increasing foreign investment in Austria. Cultural and social reforms were demanded, and emphasis was placed on attending to the needs of young people. In line with its appeal to youth, the party supported a plan to shorten the term of military service.
Under Bruno Kreisky, who became chairman of the SPÖ in 1967, the party continued its move toward the center of the ideological spectrum. Although party platforms continued to refer to the classless society as an ideal, the SPÖ was careful to distinguish its brand of socialism from the centralized, inefficient version of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The party program of 1978 stressed the four principles of freedom, equality, justice, and solidarity. Central to the SPÖ's philosophy was a guarantee for all Austrians of freedom from fear, hunger, exploitation, and unemployment. The freedom to pursue wealth had to be balanced by the government's guarantee of equal opportunity and social justice.
Under Kreisky the SPÖ triumphed at the polls in 1970, 1971, 1975, and 1979, and between 1971 and 1983 the party enjoyed an absolute majority in parliament. The Kreisky governments laid great emphasis on improving the social welfare system and achieving full employment. The Kreisky era also featured the flourishing of the technocrats--SPÖ politicians successful in business and banking whose lavish life-styles seemed incongruous in a party supposed to represent the interests of labor.
In the parliamentary election of 1983, the SPÖ lost its absolute majority, and Kreisky decided to retire from politics rather than preside over a coalition government. Fred Sinowatz, Kreisky's minister for education, was chosen as chancellor in a coalition government with the FPÖ. The Sinowatz era, from 1983 to 1986, proved to be a short interregnum and was not distinguished by any great achievements.
Franz Vranitzky, born in 1937, became chancellor in June 1986 when Sinowatz resigned after the SPÖ lost the presidential election to Kurt Waldheim. Vranitzky replaced Sinowatz as party chairman in May 1988, becoming the first person from a workingclass background to hold this position. Despite his working-class heritage, Vranitzky had had a successful career in banking before entering politics.
Under Vranitzky the SPÖ moved to restore its image among rank-and-file members by improving its methods of intraparty communication. Computers and direct mail technology were used to gauge the opinions of members in the provinces, and efforts were made to improve recruiting techniques by means of recreational groups. In the area of government policy, Vranitzky stressed that limits on state activity were necessary, although he noted that health care and education were fields where market forces had to be regulated.
Vranitzky displayed a more open attitude toward the question of privatizing government industries than Kreisky had. To a large extent, changes in this area were inevitable because of large losses in the state industrial sector that came to light in 1985. Vranitzky embraced the principle that privatization should be pursued if it would lead to greater operational efficiency. The press dubbed Vranitzky's approach "pinstripe socialism." The policy has proven to be a responsible one and has been fairly popular with Austrians.
In 1984 the SPÖ launched a program called Perspectives '90, designed to promote intraparty discussion on current issues. A major aim of the leadership was to show that the party was eager to listen to grass-roots concerns. A series of nationwide debates eventually led to the issuance of a draft document in 1986 that incorporated the views of party members on issues such as the environment, controls on the development of technology, and democratization of society. Events that had embarrassed the party, such as the conflict over the Hainburg power plant in 1984 and Minister for Defense Friedhelm Frischenschläger's reception of Walter Reder in 1985, were also discussed (see Political Developments since 1983 , this ch.).
An estimated 30,000 party members participated in the Perspectives '90 meetings, which took place in 1,000 local groups. The success of this project led the SPÖ to stage the Congress for the Future in Vienna in the summer of 1987, where 400 of the party's top leaders and intellectual luminaries discussed the outlook for social democracy. It was agreed that the SPÖ needed to formulate an alternative to the neoconservatism of the 1980s that would allow for greater codetermination in the workplace but also avoid the pitfalls of too much state control. After the success of this conference, the SPÖ began planning another that would produce a Social Democratic Manifesto for the Year 2000.
Membership in the SPÖ is direct (unlike the ÖVP, where a person joins an organization affiliated with the party). SPÖ's membership grew rapidly in the postwar period--from 360,000 members in 1946 to its peak of nearly 720,000 members in 1979. With the loosening of the grip of the Lager on Austrian society, SPÖ's membership has declined slightly. In the early 1990s, it was estimated at 700,000.
Party organization remained centralized as of the early 1990s. The main link between rank-and-file members and party leaders are the activists known as Vertrauenspersonen, who personally collect annual membership dues. At the local level, the SPÖ is represented by almost 4,000 groups in villages and towns. Every two years, the SPÖ holds a federal conference that elects the party executive, which has sixty-five members. Because of the executive's unwieldy size, a smaller group, known as the presidium, is selected from it and actually conducts most party business.
Delegates to the federal conference are drawn from the various suborganizations of the party. The party has two youth organizations, the Young Generation (Junge Generation--JG) and the Socialist Youth of Austria (Sozialistische Jugend Österreichs --SJÖ). The Group of Socialist Trade Unionists (Fraktion Sozialistischer Gewerkschaftler--FSG) sends fifty-two delegates to the conference. There is also a Women's Committee, which has representatives from each province. Over the years, women have consistently made up one-third of SPÖ's membership. In 1985 the federal conference passed an amendment providing for greater representation of women in the party and larger numbers of female candidates. Progress toward this goal has been slow, however, and in 1989 only eleven of the SPÖ's deputies in the Nationalrat were female.
SPÖ candidates for parliamentary elections are determined by the Party Council, whose members come from the nine provincial party organizations. The party executive and the heads of the nine provincial parties have an input into the selection process. Roughly one-fifth of the places are reserved for high-ranking party officials, whose presence in the Nationalrat is considered imperative.
The Austrian People's Party
The Austrian People's Party (Österreichische Volkspartei-- ÖVP) was created in Vienna in 1945 by leaders of the former Christian Social Party (Christlichsoziale Partei--CSP). The founders of the ÖVP made sure that the new party was only loosely tied to the Roman Catholic Church, unlike its predecessor. The ÖVP emerged as a conservative, democratic party based on Christian values that sought to include diverse interests. From 1945 to 1966, ÖVP politicians filled the post of chancellor in a series of grand coalition governments with the SPÖ (from 1945 to 1947, KPÖ members were also in the cabinet). From 1966 to 1970, the ÖVP ruled alone and thereafter entered a long period of opposition to the SPÖ, which ended in early 1987 when the two parties formed a new coalition government.
The ÖVP periodically has revised its party program. During the 1945-55 period, the party advocated low taxes, reduced government expenditures, a balanced budget, and low wage increases. The ÖVP favored a limited government role in the economy. After much debate, in 1965 the party adopted the Klagenfurt Manifesto, which referred to the ÖVP as an "open people's party" of the "new center." The manifesto laid less emphasis than previous ones on the priority of personal property in a democracy. It also stressed the importance of expanding economic welfare and educational opportunities for all social groups.
After suffering losses in the 1970 parliamentary election, the ÖVP entered the opposition for the first time. A wide-ranging discussion of principles took place at all levels of the party. The outcome of this process was the 1972 Salzburg Program, which described the ÖVP as a "progressive center party" dedicated to integrating Austria's different social groups. The program reaffirmed the party's commitment to a free and independent country, a multiparty democracy, and a social market economy combining free enterprise and some government intervention. As of 1993, the Salzburg Program had not been replaced as the basic statement of ÖVP ideology.
The ÖVP had a less centralized form of party organization than the SPÖ as of the early 1990s. At the top is the party presidium, composed of the party chairman, the chancellor and vice chancellor (if they are members of the ÖVP), the general secretary, up to six deputies to the chairman, the leader of the party's parliamentary faction, and eight additional members drawn from the provinces and interest groups affiliated with the party. The party holds a national conference at least once every three years. Roughly 600 delegates from the provinces and the party's auxiliary organizations attend the conference, which elects the party chairman, the deputies, and the general secretary.
The auxiliary organizations play important roles in the ÖVP's internal workings. The key organizations are the League of Austrian Workers and Salaried Employees (Österreichischer Arbeiter- und Angestelltenbund--ÖAAB), the League of Austrian Business (Österreichischer Wirtschaftsbund--ÖWB), and the League of Austrian Farmers (Österreichischer Bauernbund--ÖBB). These organizations represent the ÖVP in the chambers of labor, commerce, and agriculture, respectively. Until 1980 the leaders of these three groups were automatically placed on the party presidium. However, this practice was abandoned after many party members complained about undue influence by interest groups over ÖVP affairs. This reform was yet another indication of the erosion in the influence of the traditional Lager over Austrian society.
The majority of ÖVP members acquire party membership indirectly via one of the auxiliary organizations. Because of indirect membership, it is difficult to arrive at a precise figure for total membership in the ÖVP. At the beginning of the 1990s, the combined membership of the three leagues was about 800,000. Adding to this figure members of the women's, youth, and senior organizations, a total membership of 1.2 million was attained. However, the ÖVP's actual membership was about onethird smaller than this because many individuals belonged to more than one league or subgroup.
The independence of auxiliary organizations affiliated with the ÖVP means that there is a fairly high degree of intraparty disagreement over policies compared with the SPÖ and other Austrian parties. One major cleavage exists between the ÖAAB, which represents the interests of working people in the ÖVP, and the ÖWB, which speaks for business interests. The farmers' group, the ÖBB, has clashed with the ÖWB over the issue of whether Austria should join the European Union (EU--see Glossary). Tensions between the wings of the party remained high even in the early 1990s, despite numerous partywide discussions of ideology designed to bring about consensus. Some experts believe that the cohesion of the Catholic-conservative Lager will be endangered if the ÖVP does not achieve a higher degree of party unity than that prevailing in 1993.
Alois Mock, who came from Lower Austria, one of the party's strongholds, held the position of party chairman from 1979 to 1989. As the party struggled with declining vote totals, many in the ÖVP concluded that his uncharismatic leadership style was a hindrance to a recovery at the polls. Mock withstood pressure for his ouster after the party's poor performance in the national election of 1986, and his stature temporarily increased when he became vice chancellor and foreign minister in the coalition government formed in early 1987 with the SPÖ. Discontent with Mock resurfaced quickly, however, and there were also disturbing signs of party disunity. After the heavy losses incurred by the ÖVP in the provincial elections in the spring of 1989, Mock's opponents pressed again for his resignation. At an emergency summit in April 1989, Mock was finally convinced to step down as party chairman. He also relinquished the post of vice chancellor. His replacement in both positions was Josef Riegler, a member of the ÖBB from Styria.
Riegler had served as agriculture minister between 1987 and 1989 and was known as a consensus seeker who would be able to get along well with the SPÖ. Riegler was also interested in developing new approaches to environmental problems, and many in the party hoped this would help the ÖVP regain some of the voters who had deserted it for the environmental, or Green, parties.
However, the devastating results of the October 1990 national election, in which the ÖVP's share of the vote declined by 9 percent, proved that the party's problems went much deeper than who held the post of party chairman. In May 1991, Riegler decided not to run again for the party chairmanship. Erhard Busek, a well-known ÖVP politician who had headed the party's Vienna branch between 1976 and 1989, won the election to succeed Riegler. At the same time, the party conference voted to reduce the number of the chairman's deputies from six to two, a sign that party members wanted to curb the influence of the interest groups.
The Freedom Party of Austria
The Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs--FPÖ) was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, who had served in the Seyss-Inquart national socialist government formed in collaboration with Hitler after the Anschluss in 1938. Anticlerical and pro-German, the FPÖ was the party of persons who were uncomfortable with the domination of Austrian politics by the "red-black" (socialist-clerical) coalition governments of the SPÖ and ÖVP. The party had liberal and nationalist wings, which frequently disagreed over strategy. Although the FPÖ was not an extremist party, it attracted many former Nazis with its philosophy that Austrians should think of themselves as belonging to a greater German cultural community.
The FPÖ's stress on nationalism made it an atypical liberal party. Nevertheless, in 1979 the FPÖ was admitted to Liberal International, the worldwide group of liberal parties. The FPÖ's ideology emphasized the preservation of individual liberties in the face of the growth of the state's power. The party enthusiastically endorsed free enterprise and individual initiative and opposed a larger role for the state in the ownership of enterprises. The FPÖ was also against the socialist idea of striving for greater equality between socioeconomic groups.
After Reinthaller's death in 1958, Friedrich Peter became the head of the FPÖ. Under his leadership, the liberal wing increased its influence, and ties to the SPÖ were developed. However, the FPÖ remained a minor party with a limited opposition role in the parliament. Between 1956 and 1983, the FPÖ's share of the vote stagnated between 5.0 and 7.7 percent. After the election of 1970, the FPÖ struck a deal with the SPÖ, which promised electoral reform in exchange for the FPÖ's support of Kreisky's minority government. The ensuing changes in the electoral laws helped the FPÖ increase its representation in parliament in subsequent elections, despite the fact that its vote totals did not rise at the same time. Peter's hope that he could make the FPÖ attractive to the SPÖ as a coalition partner was dashed by Kreisky's success in obtaining absolute majorities in the elections of 1971, 1975, and 1979. It was only in 1983, when the SPÖ lost its majority, that it turned to the FPÖ to form a government. The FPÖ's brief three-year experience in power in the SPÖ-FPÖ coalition of 1983-86 was mostly frustrating, as the government stumbled from one crisis to the next.
Norbert Steger was FPÖ party chairman between 1980 and 1986. A member of the party's liberal wing, Steger served as vice chancellor and minister for trade in the SPÖ-FPÖ coalition. He was not a charismatic politician, and, as the coalition's troubles mounted, he began to lose support among the party's rank and file. At an FPÖ convention in the spring of 1986, Jörg Haider, leader of the Carinthian branch of the party, launched a successful coup against Steger and became the new chairman.
Haider, born in 1950, is a handsome, dashing figure whose self-confidence strikes many observers as verging on arrogance. He comes from the nationalist wing of the party and has stirred controversy on many occasions by his remarks about Austria's proper place in the German cultural community. On one occasion in 1988, Haider referred to Austria as "an ideological deformity." Since Haider took control of the FPÖ in 1986, the party has achieved dramatic gains at the polls in both national and provincial elections. In the March 1989 provincial election in Carinthia, the FPÖ displaced the ÖVP as the second strongest party, and Haider was elected governor of the province with votes from the ÖVP. This election marked the first time that a provincial governor was not from either of the two major parties. Haider's term as governor was cut short in June 1991 by the controversy unleashed by his remark during a parliamentary debate that the Third Reich's employment policy was a positive model. The ÖVP and SPÖ joined together to pass a vote of no confidence against Haider, marking the first time in the history of the Second Republic that a governor was forced to step down. Haider did not allow this setback to create challenges to his leadership of the party. In three provincial elections in the fall of 1991, Haider led the FPÖ to outstanding showings, proving that Austrian voters were increasingly ready to vote for alternatives to the two major parties.
A less charitable interpretation of the FPÖ's rise under Haider is that Austrian politics has taken a turn to the right. At times in his career, Haider has given his critics ample reason for accusing him of neo-Nazi tendencies. He has frequently pandered to the sentiments of the far right, but his everyday political discourse is more moderate. Haider tailors his remarks to his audiences, and he resorts to the rhetoric of right-wing populism in order to inspire the conservative nationalists in the FPÖ.
A major element in Haider's prescriptions for Austria is his desire to cut down drastically on the number of foreigners allowed to live in the country. Haider consistently argues that immigration is excessive and is causing serious problems for Austrian citizens in the areas of jobs and housing. Haider's campaign against foreigners was a major reason for the passage of a 1991 law that decreed that foreign workers could not make up more than 10 percent of the work force. In 1993 this ceiling was reduced to 9 percent when a new law, the Resident Alien Law, went into effect. Early in the same year, Haider sponsored a referendum to further tighten the control over the number of foreigners in Austria. Although he got only half of the 800,000 signatures he sought, the language Haider used in his campaign was extreme enough to cause large counterdemonstrations.
The tensions between Haider and the liberal wing of the party caused five FPÖ members of the Nationalrat to leave the party in early 1993 and form a new party, The Liberal Forum (Das Liberale Forum). Led by the FPÖ's 1992 presidential candidate, Heide Schmidt, the group won seats in the Upper Austria provincial elections of May 1993. The new party was also recognized by Liberal International, which was expected to expel Haider's FPÖ from its ranks in 1994 because it advocated policies incompatible with traditional European liberalism.
Despite these setbacks, Haider is expected to remain a formidable force in Austrian politics. His sense for the issues that trouble many voters and his ability to enunciate views too extreme for the larger parties will likely win him a substantial following during the rest of the 1990s as the country struggles to adapt to post-Cold War conditions.
Membership in the FPÖ is direct (there is no tradition of joining an organization affiliated with the party, as with the SPÖ). The party's membership grew from 22,000 in 1959 to 40,000 in 1990. The membership-voter ratio declined as the party made dramatic gains at the polls. The FPÖ's share of the vote in national elections tripled between 1983 and 1990, when it achieved 16.6 percent. The FPÖ has a strong base of support in the provinces of Carinthia and Salzburg. The party draws much of its support from the middle class, salaried employees, and the self-employed. More than 60 percent of its voters are under the age of forty-four, and many are well educated. The party has few auxiliary organizations, in comparison with the ÖVP and the SPÖ. In addition to an organization for people in business, it has groups for academics, students, and retired persons. The FPÖ's party structure is decentralized, and provincial organizations play an important role in party affairs. The party chairman, who is elected by the party conference, chooses the party manager and general secretary. The general secretary acts as a liaison between federal leaders and provincial organizations.
