Teeter-Totter

Postwar Austria is a political teeter-totter balanced precariously and almost exactly between two parties: the leftist Socialists (73 seats) and the conservative Catholic People's Party (74 seats). The one man who kept everything from tumbling down was Chancellor Leopold Figl, himself a conservative, who for eight years presided over a coalition of the two opposing parties with tact and humor.

Last October the balancing act began to break down. Figl resigned, and in new elections his party lost three seats in the parliamentary election, the Socialists gained six. The rightists in Figl's People's Party charged him with softness toward the Socialists. The leaders of Figl's party announced that they would not join any new coalition government unless it included the neo-Nazi Union of Independents. The Socialists refused. For 38 days Austria was without a cabinet.

Last week the deadlock was broken. A new coalition cabinet was formed. The neo-Nazis were excluded, which was a victory for the Socialists. But the rightists in the People's Party also won, for Figl was out as Chancellor, and in his place was a blunt, tough-talking engineer, Julius Raab, a right-winger. Raab, 61, was a charter member of the Heimwehr, Prince Ernst Ruediger von Starhemberg's private fascist army back in the late '20s; in 1930 he took the famous Heimwehr oath, ". . . We reject the democratic western Parliament . . ."; in 1938 he served briefly in the pro-Nazi cabinet appointed by Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg to appease Hitler, and took on the job of aligning Austria's economy with Germany's rearmament plan. During World War II, while Figl and other anti-Nazis were in concentration camps, Raab was free and an engineer for an Austrian road-building firm.

Socialists respect Raab for being a man of his word and for speaking it frankly but detest his politics. Chances are that before long, Austria will be wishing for the return of Figl's famous balancing act.

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