Innsbruck: Tursky challenges Willi

2023-09-27 02:04:00

Digitization State Secretary Florian Tursky (VP) will run as a candidate for mayor in his hometown of Innsbruck. There will be elections in the state capital in spring 2024, Tursky wants to run as a joint candidate for VP, “For Innsbruck” (FI) and “Tyrolean Senior Citizens’ Association”. The parties had previously announced an electoral alliance. Tursky challenges incumbent Georg Willi (Greens).

Regardless of the outcome of the election, Tursky said he wanted to turn his back on Vienna and switch to Innsbruck city politics. However, he will remain State Secretary until the election because: “Innsbruck doesn’t need seven months of election campaign.”

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Tursky also wants to run for city party chairman in the fall. The incumbent Vice Mayor of Innsbruck, Johannes Anzengruber, who has fallen out of favor with the blacks, also wants to become party and city leader. The State Secretary was calm about this: You can feel that the alliance partners are “pulling together,” emphasized the 35-year-old.

Tursky did not want to see his appointment as a stepping stone into the country as a possible successor to Governor Anton Mattle (VP). After several months of negotiations, the “bourgeois parties” had agreed on a “centre alliance” and on running together with a “connecting personality” – Tursky.

“After 30 years of division, we have managed to bring together what belongs together: the civil forces in Innsbruck are once again united and pulling together for the good of the city,” said Tyrol’s Governor Mattle, speaking of a “quite historic agreement.”

But it’s not just the Innsbruck VP that has been making headlines in recent weeks: city politics as a whole has been seen as divided and confused for years and is known for its sprawling, often extremely emotional local council meetings.

The former coalition of the Greens, VP, FI and SP broke up in 2021 after heated disputes – not least because the Greens agreed to the deselection of FI chairwoman Christine Oppitz-Plörer as deputy mayor due to the increase in costs associated with the construction of the new Patscherkofelbahn.

Since then, the “free play of forces” has prevailed and Willi found himself increasingly torpedoed by a “bourgeois alliance” – i.e. by the VP, FI and the FP. But Willi himself wants to know again and has already announced that he will start in the spring.