Karl Lueger

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Karl Lueger : biography

24 October 1844 – 10 March 1910

Karl Lueger ( not ; 24 October 1844 – 10 March 1910) was an Austrian politician, mayor of Vienna, and leader and cofounder the Austrian Christian Social Party. He is credited with the transformation of the city of Vienna into a modern city. The populist and anti-Semitic politics of his Christian Social Party are sometimes viewed as a model for Hitler’s Nazism.Fareed Zacharia, The Future of Freedon; Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, Norton, 2003, 2007, p. 60

Political career

Lueger played a part in many political spheres, including Vienna City Council, eventually becoming mayor, the federal Austrian parliament and the state parliament of Lower Austria.

Viennese municipal politics

[[Burgtheater on Universitaets-Ring, part of Vienna’s famous Ringstraße]] In 1875 he was elected as a liberal deputy of Vienna’s City Council (Gemeinderat). He was a member of the from 1875 to 1876 and from 1878 to 1910. He campaigned against the government of liberal mayor Cajetan Felder and achieved popularity as a campaigner against corruption.

In 1888 he brought together the German National (Deutschnationale) and Christian Social factions at City Hall to form a group that later became known as the United Christians (Vereinigte Christen).

After the 1895 elections for the Vienna Gemeinderat the Christian Socialists took political power from the ruling Liberals with two thirds of the seats and subsequently helped Lueger win the mayoralty. It did however take him two more years to prevail against the resistance of Prime-Minister Kasimir Felix Badeni and three refusals by Emperor Franz Joseph who allegedly loathed him as a person considering him a dangerous revolutionary. After personal intercession by Pope Leo XIII his election was finally sanctioned in 1897.

He was a zealous Catholic, and wished to “capture the university” for the Church. He would have neither Social Democrats nor Pan-Germans nor Jews in the municipal administration. He secured good treatment for Czech immigrants.

He planned to make Vienna one of the most beautiful of garden cities.

In his incumbency, Lueger is credited with the extension of the public water supply by its second main aquifer (Hochquellwasserleitung), which provides tap water of mineral water quality to large parts of the city. He also pursued the municipalization of gas and electricity works as well as the establishment of a public transport system introducing streetcars, and numerous institutions of social welfare, most of which strongly relied on debt financing. He incorporated the suburbs, and built parks and gardens, and hospitals and schools.

A bachelor throughout his life, der schöne Karl ("handsome Karl") achieved tremendous popularity among the citizens. During his tenure, Vienna ultimately changed its appearance as the capital of a great power of the pre-World War I era – an heritage that remained even in Red Vienna after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918. A significant part of the infrastructure and organisations that are responsible for the high standard of living in the contemporary city were created during his terms of office.

Lueger served as mayor of Vienna until his early death from diabetes mellitus in 1910. He was buried in the crypt of the newly erected St Charles Borromeo Church at the Zentralfriedhof (also called Dr. Karl Lueger Memorial Church), whose groundbreaking ceremony he had performed himself.

Christian Social movement

Lueger’s early political life was associated with Georg von Schönerer and the German National Party, which was anti-Semitic. From the late 1880s onwards Lueger was a regular attendee at the influential circles of clerical social conservative politicians around Karl von Vogelsang, Prince Aloys Franz de Paula Maria of Liechtenstein, and the theologian Franz Martin Schindler. In view of the rising labour movement, the participants on the basis of Catholic social teaching developed ideas to overcome social polarisation by several measures of social security legislation and the common Catholic faith. Morevover, after a 1882 electoral reform had expanded the electorate suffrage, Lueger focussed on petty bourgeois tradespersons, who assumed the Jewish competition to be the underlying cause of their precarious situation, and discovered that raising the "Jewish Question" earned him enormous popularity.