The population of Austria in 2017 was 8.8 million people, with the majority of the population living in urban areas such as Vienna, Graz and Linz. The economy of Austria is highly developed and open, with a GDP of $443 billion and a high per capita income. Austria is a member of the European Union and NATO, and has close ties to many countries throughout Europe as well as the United States. In terms of politics, Austria is a federal parliamentary democracy with President Alexander Van der Bellen as its head of state. The Chancellor is Sebastian Kurz who leads the People’s Party-Austrian People’s Party coalition government which has been in power since December 2017. See militarynous for Austria military and defense.
Yearbook 2017
Austria. During the year, Austria got Europe’s youngest head of government in 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, when his People’s Party (ÖVP) won the new election in October. The conservative and Christian democratic ÖVP received 31.6% of the vote, the Social Democratic SPÖ 26.9% and the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) 26%. According to Countryaah.com, the Greens ended up out of Parliament with just 3.9% of the vote.
It was in May that the newly elected leader of the ÖVP, as well as the country’s foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz agreed with the Chancellor of the Interior and the SPÖ leader Christian Kern to announce new elections this fall. This since the ÖVP-SPÖ coalition has burst. See ABBREVIATIONFINDER for frequently used acronyms and abbreviations related to as well as country profile of Austria.
After the election, the newly elected Chancellor Kurz looked far to the right and, at the end of October, invited anti-xenophobic FPÖ and its leader Hans-Christian Strache to talks about a possible government coalition. The Chancellor promised that a functioning government would be in place within two months. In December, Sebastian Kurz and his conservative ÖVP then formed a coalition government together with the right-wing populists FPÖ. Both parties joined, among other things. to elections for a tighter migration policy and less EU influence. The new government got several FPÖ representatives on important posts: Herbert Kickl became Minister of the Interior, Mario Kunasek Minister of Defense and Karin Kneissl Foreign Minister and party leader Heinz-Christian Strache who became Vice Chancellor.
In June, the trial started against eleven men charged with murder, torture and smuggling. They are responsible for the tragic incident in August 2015 when 71 refugees were found dead in an abandoned truck on a motorway in Austria near the Hungary border. The trial is taking place in Hungary, where four of the men are charged with murder, torture and smuggling, the other seven for torture and smuggling.
There has been a ban on a comprehensive veil in Austria since 1 October. It got a man who participated in an advertising campaign dressed up for shark experience. He was fined by the police a week after the ban was introduced, after refusing to remove the shark mask with the motivation “I just do my job”.
Vienna
Vienna, the capital of Austria; 1.8 million housing (2015; approximately 2.4 million in the metropolitan area), 415 km2, half of which are green areas. The city of the Danube is a municipality with city council, divided into 23 Bezirke, Austria’s smallest state with the Senate and surrounded by Lower Austria.
Vienna has experienced four periods of extraordinarily large construction efforts. The first covers the time after the Ottomans’ final defeat in 1683, when the old town center was equipped with Baroque palaces.
Today, the historic center of Vienna is the area between the Danube Canal and the pompous Ringstraße. It houses numerous churches and monasteries, public buildings, banks and shops, as well as small houses in crooked alleys and in 2001 was designated the UNESCO World Heritage Site (see World Heritage List).
The second extension, immediately after the old fortifications were demolished, gave way to Ringstraße and its splendid buildings in historical styles from this Vienna’s Founder’s period in the latter half of the 1800’s.
Ca. 2 km outside the Ringstraße, an outer ring street, Gürtel, has been constructed, which in an arch connects them in the second half of the 1800’s. built railway stations, Franz Joseph Bahnhof, Westbahnhof and Südbahnhof.
Rote Wien is regarded as the third extension, which includes the period 1922-34, with large social housing such as the Werkbundsiedlung in Sankt Veit. All this was crushed in 1934 by Dollfuß’s fascist coup.
After 1945, for example, the major buildings include UNO-City with UN bodies and the 252 m high television tower in Donaustadt. These include the Hundertwasserhaus near the Danube Canal and concrete blocks, especially east of the Danube, as well as outer suburban extensions to the west, towards the Wienerwald and Lainzer Tiergarten.
For centuries, Vienna has been inundated with floods, which is why the so-called Great Danube Regulation was implemented in the 1870’s. Thus, the original race, the Alte Danube, is today cut off and forms a long, curved lake. It is replaced by two parallel canals, the Danube and the Neue Danube, separated by the 22 km long and 200 m wide island of Danube Island with bathing beaches, undeveloped and car-free.
In through Vienna, the Danube canal, which separates the city center from the old camp quarters Brigittenau, the dilapidated residential town of Leopoldstadt and the huge Prater area (see Prater) with amusement park with the 65 m high Ferris wheel Riesenrad (1897), exhibition center, stadium and the largest green area.
Other parks are found along the Ring, at Schönbrunn and in other suburban areas, especially to the north. The Jews have had a grim history in Vienna – worst in the 1900’s. Before World War II, it contained 185,000 Jews; after the Nazi persecution 12,000.
Vienna’s public transport had to be completely rebuilt after 1945 by tramways and buses. In 1966, subways were added, and the city’s public transport system is today an extensive and dense network with, among other things. six underground lines; more extensions are on the way.
Remote traffic is handled by the state highways and by Schwechat Airport 19 km SE of the city center. In terms of business, the city is dominated by public offices, institutions and educational establishments, and by trade, finance and private services in tourism and cultural services.
As a cultural center, Vienna has played a major role since the Middle Ages. It is, first and foremost, one of the world’s most important centers of classical music. Musikverein, Wiener State Opera with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Wiener Sängerknaben. There are museums for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Johann Strauß, all living in the city, as well as several annual music and theater festivals.
An artistic highlight was the years around 1900, when the city was home to several fertile environments. Names like Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, JM Olbrich and Adolf Loos were particularly prominent in architecture, the Wiener Werkstätte in the arts and Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, etc. in the field of visual arts.
Literature Karl Kraus became a critical speaker for several of the central trends of the time through his journal Die Fackel. The final decades of the empire from the 1880’s to 1918 also became epoch-making in Vienna in the history of music.
Gustav Mahler’s music represented the transition from Late Romanticism to Modernism, whose important arnested city was brought into force by the work of Arnold Schönberg in particular, as well as his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern.