She gives away three quarters of her wages
Elke Kahr is a communist. She has governed the Austrian city of Graz for a year and a half. What has she accomplished during this time?
Elke Kahr announces the coalition of her communists with the Greens and Social Democrats at a press conference in 2021.
Photo: Martin Juen (Imago)
Their victory was their defeat: After 18 years, Siegfried Nagl was voted out of the Austrian People’s Party, whom they called “Beton-Sigi” in Graz because he had so many built, but not cheap apartments, but rather investment properties serving investors. But then the majority of the voters had had enough, even the commoners worried about green spaces and the historic city center in Styria.
A year and a half ago, a third of those who voted elected 61-year-old Elke Kahr as mayor of the city, which is home to almost 300,000 people, in order to slow down this excessive construction, among other things. Her election was a shock for some politicians, she says in an interview with the Berlin daily newspaper: “I’m a woman, a communist and I come from the working-class milieu, it was a pack of three that some found difficult to cope with.” Every fifth person in Graz is at risk of poverty. The communists have formed a coalition with the social democrats and greens.
She gives away 6000 euros – monthly
In order to maintain contact with the people, Kahr usually has office hours two afternoons a week and on Saturdays as well. People come to her who need help, she says. This is how you get to know their worries and wishes. Sometimes she also helps with money. As mayor of Graz, she gets a wage of 8,000 euros, 6,000 of which she passes on to the citizens. “Even a party lives from its people,” she says in interviews. “And they have to be a role model.”
Elke Kahr grew up in a poor apartment in a workers’ settlement after being adopted at the age of three. From this she explains her political stance. Since she doesn’t think much of phrase-mongering, she doesn’t carry her worldview “in front of me like a monstrance”. Nor does she believe in theoretical debates “if they have no practical consequences”.
Elke Kahr finds the war of aggression against Ukraine terrible, but also calls it a tragedy “that the sanctions do not end this war”.
Parts of the KPÖ have never clarified their relationship with Russia, and although Elke Kahr finds the aggressive war against Ukraine terrible, she also calls it a tragedy in an interview with the “Standard” that “the sanctions do not end this war”. That’s not enough for the right-wing New Austria party, which praises Kahr as a pacifist, but still sees her as a henchman of the Putin regime because she doesn’t want to support the sanctions.
It’s easier at home. The mayor has taken over two dossiers that are crucial for her, namely the housing and social welfare offices. Your KPÖ is the housing party in Graz and has built many community apartments and bought land where a cooperative builds a house and the city has access. Anyone looking for an apartment who has too little money gets 1,000 euros from the housing office, which they only have to pay back when they move away. The rent should not make up more than a third of the income – that only exists in your city. This would also offer a tenant emergency call. All this is necessary because many people in Graz have to get by with 1,500 euros.
Why she is not a social democrat
As a role model, Elke Kahr cites the Belgian Labor Party, the third largest party in the country and the fastest growing left-wing force in Europe. She explains that she chose the communists and not the social democracy in her Austrian homeland by referring to the privileges enjoyed by many people in this party. The SPÖ had also made too many compromises with the ÖVP at the federal level, which gave “all the pied pipers like Jörg Haider and Heinz-Christian Strache” a boost.
If she were voted out herself, she says, she wouldn’t get depressed if she weren’t a politician anymore. At heart she is a grassroots activist. And that seems to go down well in Graz.
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