Another Easter
Today I realized Cards for Ukraine is now nearly one year old. Shocking and sad. Recommended reading, viewing & listening. A brief rant on Austrian politics (sorry).
This afternoon, I delivered another nine supermarket gift cards to families at the arrival center in Vienna. The mood was low and depressed. Long, holiday weekend. No movement on housing assignments. Living for weeks and in some cases months on cots in group rooms with showers in containers outside is taking its toll, both mentally and physically.
A young mom told me her four year old son ran a fever for several days; Nurofen was offered. Their granny, herself aged only 46, has been in Austria for a year, in social housing in Lower Austria, but a family reunification is easier said than done. The boy isn’t even allowed to stay in his granny’s dorm room as his mother waits for a housing assignment she hopes might be somewhere in the vicinity of grandmother.
A dad, alone with two children aged nine and ten, told me he came back to the center after being assigned housing in a village so small the entire town was 500 meters from start to finish. You only get to say “no” twice to housing offers, he explained. He desperately hopes for something near some kind of infrastructure, school(s) for his son and daughter. I didn’t ask about mom. I assume there is a sad or even tragic backstory why she is not with them. When he wrote me, he asked for a card not for himself, but for his kids. “They barely eat the food here”. I hear that repeatedly.
Today was particularly depressing because it is Easter Sunday in Austria, everything is closed, and handing out the cards, I had to explain the supermarket where they can use the cards will only open on Tuesday morning. They all complain about the food at the arrival center. I nod, hearing the same sentences for the hundredth time. They all express a strong desire to work paid jobs ASAP, and I have to be the one to explain there are limitations on how much you can legally earn when you accept free housing from the state. Get in private accommodation as soon as you can is the best advice I have, but totally unrealistic if the person standing in front of me is an ordinary Ukrainian for whom a three-month deposit on private, rented accommodation in Austria is an unsurmountable financial hurdle, and therefore an impediment to full-time employment, perhaps an even bigger impediment than the obvious language barrier.
All this in the context of an Austrian labor market complaining loudly it cannot find workers to fill jobs across sectors. I chatted with a middle-aged woman who came alone from Dnipro and is really desperate to find work “I don’t want to live on benefits”. I suggested she look at the tourism sector; there she might find employee housing. She came alone, has no constraints, and speaks English. An ideal candidate, in theory. But she needs an address to even start a job search…and receive a blue card. Yet another chicken and egg situation.
Every time I leave the arrival center I walk away feeling low, wondering why Austria doesn’t formally announce it has no more housing if it doesn’t plan on housing anymore Ukrainian refugees. Why those in charge of economic policy make it so difficult for able-bodied, eager to work immigrants to find legal employment. For example, a helpful gesture would be a three-month grace period to live in free state housing and then find private housing once one finds a job. At the moment, the incentives drive many to lean towards trying to live off the meager social payments, attend German courses, but not work full time. As soon as you start really earning, you have the rug pulled out from under you. Which is stupid. And yet there is not the political will here in Austria to change a system — Grundversorgung — which has been broken for at least a decade. So when something is broken and no one fixes it, it makes you wonder if that is indeed how those in charge want it — broken.
I have avoided commenting on Twitter on the colossal shitshow that Austrian politics have morphed into in recent months because I don’t feel comfortable, not being able to vote here, and seeing worrying developments in every direction I look. The far right has become “normalised”, recieves 30% of the vote per recent polls. The traditional conservative party has been marred by corruption scandals and recently formed a government in Lower Austria with the far right, some of whom are very close to the four-letter N word we aren’t allowed to use in this country for historical reasons. This week, a conservative finance minister said he would not rule out a national coalition with the far right. In other words, what were once extreme views have become mainstream, and just like under Trump, the traditional right of center party has moved further right for fear of losing voters. There are no moral principles, it would seem.
On the left, the traditional social democrat “working man and woman” party is dying a very public, group suicide. Marred by weak leadership for years, there is now a very public leadership fight amongst several leading party politicians, and all the dirty laundry is coming out to dry. Shocking statements by some members on the war in Ukraine. Several MPs did not bother to show up to listen to Zelensky’s address to the Austrian parliament. In short — you don’t know what the left actually stands for anymore, and certainly in terms of foreign policy — they are at times as bad as the far right. Some astute commentators have speculated the self-implosion of the social democrats will lead to the birth of new left-of-center parties. One could hope. Or perhaps it will just roll out the red carpet (pun intended) for a new right of center government to rule Austria which will look more like Orban’s Hungary. Not a far fetched idea, actually. This country feels at times one charismatic white man short of turning into an autocratic, xenophobic Russian satellite in Europe. I know that is a very strong statement. And I hope with all of my might that I am terribly wrong, and too pessimistic by nature to see the true state of affairs.
Some parties in the center give hope. There are a lot of genuinely good people working for the Greens, and in general they have good intentions. But they make deals with the devil to stay in power, and as a result, achieve very few of their stated policy goals in practice. The one party that has been firm on its views towards the war in Ukraine and with whom I personally find myself nodding in agreement with most often are the Neos, but they don’t seem to be able to break beyond the 10%-ish mark on a national level, and there are many wonderful people on the left of the political spectrum whose hearts are absolutely in the right place who will never vote for anything referring to itself as “neo-liberal”. I walk around Vienna near university buildings and it is not uncommon to see signs proclaiming death to capitalism and a communist revolution and honestly, it scares the crap out of me. Have we learned nothing from the past?
So you have an impasse. A so-called “neutral” country, surrounded by NATO states, with an alarming number of business and political ties to Putin’s Russia, both past and present, across several parties and industries. And one of those NATO states is Hungary, which is sounding more and more like a Moscow satellite these days. I’ve honestly gotten to the point where I don’t dare think about the future because it scares me.
I look around me and see ordinary people in a different light. I wonder who they vote for. I wonder what they really think of foreigners. I wonder how racist and xenophobic they are at their core.
I cannot square the incredible support we have received for Cards for Ukraine from Austrian civil society with the xenophobic rhetoric which has become normalised by politicians (and some of the media). With the rise of “Austria for Austrians” and all that entails. And every time I come back from a trip abroad, I feel like I am returning to a time capsule, for better and for worse, if that makes sense. Sometimes it feels like the world is moving forward while Austria is standing still and even moving backwards. That really scares me. Canada blew me away with how it transformed tolerance and equality into a national mantra. I fear here in Europe some nations are moving entirely in the other direction.
I didn’t link to sources for the comments I made above, but perhaps another day I can expand with more supporting information. That’s enough for now. That is, broadly, what I worry about here on the ground.
Some long-weekend recommended viewing and reading. Unfortunately I still cannot embed tweets (thanks, Elon):
I’ve only just discovered Arkady Ostrovsky’s podcast for The Economist: Next Year in Moscow. Everyone online has been raving. The first episode did not disappoint.
Elderly Ukrainians and their pets stay put in the abandoned east (CNN)
I’m a sniper. And I’m pregnant: meet Ukraine’s frontline lovers (Sunday Times)
The Russians took their children. These mothers went and got them back. (New York Times)
Rückkehr zu den Frauen im Krieg: Warum sie stark bleiben | #WHY - Sophia Maier, an excellent hour-long report in German on women in Ukraine, one year on. I am always impressed when journalists without Ukrainian or Russian language skills are able to capture so many emotions, but Sophia does a great job.
Oh yes…we saw Air in the cinema last night. It was great! Highly recommend!
This cutie adorned our Easter table today. I ordered it over Instagram from a cafe in Vienna which is apparently now Ukrainian-run. It was doing a bustling brunch business this morning, and reminded me I want to make time to sample some of the new businesses popping up by Ukrainian owners trying to bring some of their gastro and aesthetic creativity to the Viennese dining scene. My teenager in tow made a note she wants to come back with friends for the “avocado toasts”.
I mailed a lot of cards over the past few days (one frequent donor generously emailed me many e-mail gift cards I was able to print at home and send), but with the long weekend, I don’t anticipate photos will start to roll in until later this week. I am almost out of cards, but I feel good that I reached those today in the most desperate situations — namely those with no fixed address and waiting at the mercy of the bureaucracy here. No address means no blue card means no social payment. It seems cruel to keep people, even kids, in limbo for so long. It would be more honest for Austria to hang up a “we’re full” sign, but that hasn’t happened yet, and although I have not been in Ukraine since the war started, I fully understand the multitude of factors driving many to come to Europe, even now, even more than a year since Russia’s invasion.
Thank you for reading and for your continued support.