ÖVP General Secretary Christian Stocker found it difficult to explain the vague term leading culture. The debate became lively on the subject of salary, where Armin Wolf clearly expressed his opinion.
With what zeal in Austria dialects are compared and become local rites: Here we say/do that! Not like over there, in the next valley! With so many differences, it is not easy to find unity. The ÖVP has recently been propagating an Austrian dominant culture, but what is that actually? On Tuesday evening, ÖVP General Secretary Christian Stocker had a hard time explaining this vague term to moderator Armin Wolf on “ZiB 2”.
Stocker mentioned “common values, language, manners, customs”, somehow this is also related to integration. However, he considered the ÖVP advertising motif “Tradition instead of multiculturalism” (the same word as one of the AfD) to be “misunderstanding” and had rightly been withdrawn. What resonates in the dominant culture debate only came up in passing when Stocker spoke about the fact that customs “will not be excluded”: the great fear of being “cancelled”.
What is often compared behind closed doors in this country is the salary. The ORF was forced by the new ORF law to publish its top earners with annual salaries of more than 170,000 euros – including their names and their side jobs. This caused a lively debate in “ZiB 2”.
Wolf’s achievements can be read on page eight of the “ORF Public Value” report. The moderator tried to calculate Stocker’s salary because the politician denied earning more than 170,000 euros a year. Wolf vehemently contradicted: “You earn at least 288,900 euros,” he calculated. “You earn 144,000 euros a year as a member of parliament alone. You also earn twelve times 7,000 euros as deputy mayor. As Secretary General, you obviously work for free, don’t you?” There is a transparency database, but “no one knows what ÖVP employees earn,” said Wolf.
Stocker wriggled out of an answer, differentiated between individual income streams and countered the moderator: He found the debate “woeful.” “I have no problem with my salary,” Wolf objected. But he doesn’t understand why only the ORF has to disclose top salaries and not all companies in which the public sector has a stake. “You should be happy that you are transparent – without demanding that everyone be transparent,” says Stocker. “Precisely because I think transparency is so great, I think it could apply to even more companies that are publicly financed,” Wolf rarely expressed his opinion clearly.
If every salary were disclosed, one would end up “in American conditions,” warned the ÖVP general secretary. Why should Halloween be the only tradition that Austria copies from America? There would be so much potential for comparison.
Read more about these topics: