The former Green Party leader has been in office for seven years; he began his second six-year term almost exactly a year ago, on January 26, 2023. The first freestyle took several attempts, and the first term in office in particular was turbulent due to the government crisis triggered by the Ibiza affair.
Van der Bellen always celebrates his birthday on a small scale, and he doesn’t want to make an exception for his big birthday, the presidential office said last week in response to a request. That’s why he’ll go to work as usual. A small, private celebration is planned for the evening, with a birthday program on ORF television. In the office, the Federal President wants to briefly toast his birthday with his employees.
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One can say that the year 2024 will be an important one for the Federal President. With the European elections in June and the National Council elections in September, directional decisions are to be made, as the center of power could shift to forces on the extreme right-wing political fringe. This is exactly what Van der Bellen has always been concerned about and warned (for example at the Alpbach Forum) about the “agenda of the populists” who sided with Russia and wanted to weaken the European community. For him, confidence and cohesion are always the counterprogram with which he won the first federal presidential election against FPÖ exponent Norbert Hofer.
“Will not promote an anti-European party”
To put it mildly, Van der Bellen has no friend in FPÖ chairman Herbert Kickl, whose party could become the strongest in the National Council elections in autumn 2024, according to surveys. A year ago, at the start of his second term in office, Van der Bellen once again left it open whether he would swear in the FPÖ leader as chancellor or give him a mandate to form a government. Van der Bellen said at the time that he would not “try to promote an anti-European party, a party that does not condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine, through my measures.” Kickl then insulted him as a “mummy in the Hofburg” and “senile”. At the FPÖ New Year’s meeting last weekend, the FPÖ leader reminded the president that “although he resides in the Hofburg, he is not emperor.”
- Video: Talk – 80th birthday of Federal President Van der Bellen
In addition to his pro-European stance and his calls to defend liberal democracy, Van der Bellen is also a constant warning when it comes to environmental policy. The climate emergency and the greenhouse effect have been scientifically proven. “How ignorant do you have to be, how removed from nature, in order not to notice this?” he asked recently in his New Year’s speech. He repeatedly expressed his solidarity with the concerns of young people who were campaigning for a planet that must remain habitable. “Anyone who still thinks they have a lot of time is making a historic mistake,” he also said in the direction of the Austrian federal government, in which his own former party is involved alongside the ÖVP and the Greens.
At the end of his term in office, Austria’s oldest federal president
As much as Van der Bellen shows solidarity with young people, he is no longer the youngest himself. With his birthday, he is already 15 years past the statutory retirement age, and when he reaches the end of his term in office in 2029, at 85, he would be the oldest Austrian Federal President ever. The economics professor began his political career in 1994 when, recruited by Peter Pilz, he entered the National Council for the Greens. Before that he was a member of the SPÖ (from the mid-1970s).
- Video: 80 years of Van der Bellen
To person: Alexander Van der Bellen, born on January 18, 1944 in Vienna to an Estonian mother and a Russian father. Grew up in the Tyrolean Kaunertal. Studied economics and taught as a university professor both in the Tyrolean capital and in Vienna. He has two sons from his first marriage, which ended in autumn 2015. His second marriage is to Doris Schmidauer.
