GRAZ, Austria — That the conservative mayor would win yet again, and serve a fifth term, had been treated as a foregone conclusion in Graz, Austria’s second-largest city, a place where it’s not uncommon to encounter local residents proudly dressed in traditional lederhosen and dirndls.
Elke Kahr, the leader of the city’s Communist Party, was equally convinced she would lose again to the slick heir to a trading dynasty who had led the city for 18 years.
So she was as surprised as the journalist who told her the election news last September: The Communists had emerged victorious, and she would be the next mayor.
“He was completely bewildered — and I thought it was a joke,” Ms. Kahr recalled of her election night conversation with the reporter at City Hall.
Newspapers across Europe started calling the city “Leningraz,” a moniker the new mayor smiles about.
“Yes, 100 percent, I’m a convinced Marxist,” Ms. Kahr said in her mayoral office, flanked by the used Ikea shelves with which she displaced the stately furniture of her predecessor, Siegfried Nagl, of the Austrian People’s Party, or Ö.V.P.
Ms. Kahr, 60, is now trying to “redistribute wealth” as much as her role allows her to, she said.
But that doesn’t mean that her Communist Party of Austria, or K.P.Ö., plans to dispossess the bourgeoisie or abolish the free market. Ms. Kahr said her goal was “to alleviate the problems of the people in our city as much as possible.” » | Denise Hruby | Friday, August 12, 2022
