Once Russia’s best friend in the West, Austria is facing trouble

Take a wrongEU turn or two in the labyrinthine Austrian federal chancellery and you might end up in a small room sporadically used for press conferences. Only the plush carpet and glistening chandeliers betray the Kongresssaal’s past glories. From September 1814 to June 1815, assorted emperors, dukes and ambassadors crammed inside in a bid to restore continental order in the wake of Napoleon’s wars. The Congress of Vienna turned into a nine-month orgy of masked balls and lavish banquets with occasional interruptions for diplomatic chit-chat. By adroitly balancing power between rival nations, the agreement (mostly) kept the peace in Europe for just shy of a century.Once the centre of an empire spanning from Italy to Ukraine, Vienna is now merely the capital of the ’s 14th-biggest member state. Notwithstanding the loss of its empire, in recent decades Austria thought it had found itself a role: as a member of the West, but with a special relationship with the Soviet bloc, then with Russia. The strategy had a certain dubious rationale—at least until Vladimir Putin, Russia’s pound-shop Bonaparte, launched a failed full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. But things in Austria have steadily got worse. A slew of corruption scandals has rumbled on nearly uninterrupted since 2019. Confidence in the country’s body politic has collapsed: the chancellorship has changed hands five times in the past six years, a rate not even Italy nor Britain has been able to match.