The Rise of Satirical Political Parties
In 2014, the Austrian punk-rock band Turbobier released a song called Die Bierpartei or ‘The Beer Party’ as part of their debut album. A rough translation of the chorus of the song goes something like this:
‘If you like being fat and drinking every day,
Then vote for us now, the Beer Party, we will abolish the alcohol tax’.
Perhaps the people of Austria took the song a bit too literally. In the Viennese state elections of 2020, die Bierpartei or BIER, led by Marco Pogo, the lead singer of Turbobier, received 1.8% of the vote and was able to win mandates in 11 of Vienna’s districts.
Dominik Wlazny, better known by his stage name Marco Pogo, graduated from the Medical University of Vienna in 2012 and worked as a medical practitioner until he left the profession in 2014 to become Turbobier’s lead singer. In 2014, Wlazny founded the ‘Beer Party of Austria’ (Bierpartei Österreich), later renamed as die Bierpartei. The party first appeared on ballots at the 2019 Austrian Legislative elections, winning just 0.6 percent of Viennese votes. However, according to recent polls, it has risen to become the third-largest party in Austria. If local elections were to happen today, the Beer Party would receive around 12 percent of Viennese votes, behind only the ruling Social Democratic Party SPÖ (35 percent) and the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria FPÖ (23 percent).
True to its name, the Beer Party’s policies begin with a beer fountain in Vienna’s city centre to replace the historic Hochstrahlbrunnen fountain, which has been operating since 1873. In their 10-point plan presented at the 2020 elections, they also promised to abolish alcohol tax while compensating with a 50% tax on Radlers (a mixture of beer and lemonade) and ‘other atrocities’. When asked how they would keep children from drinking the beer, Wlazny replied in an interview with The Times that there would always be a security guard at the fountain to check IDs.
They also have more serious initiatives, such as transitioning to green energy, prioritizing social services, reforming immigration policies to house Ukrainian refugees, and animal welfare.
If these polls translate into electoral success, the Beer Party can expect to elect as many as 19 MPs, overtaking the more established Green Party. Austria has a history of minor political parties crossing the threshold of votes required to get representation in the National Council, the lower house of Parliament. Perhaps most prominently, the Peter Pilz Liste, founded by Peter Pilz in 2017 after he left the Green Party to run in the 2017 Legislative elections, won 4.4% of the vote and 8 seats. But even then, the party quickly fizzled out, and it lost representation in the National Council in the 2019 elections. However, the Beer Party’s poll results have steadily been increasing. In 2022, its leader, Marco Pogo, took a step further and stood in the Austrian Presidential Elections, winning 8.3% of the vote, more than 337,000 votes. If trends continue and Pogo presents more serious policies, the Beer Party could become a lasting force in Austrian politics and a viable alternative to traditional political parties.
This incident of what started as effectively a joke party potentially becoming a serious force in politics is not isolated to Austria. A similar phenomenon can currently be seen in Germany, where Die PARTEI (The PARTY, an acronym for Party for Labour, Rule of Law, Animal Protection, Promotion of Elites and Grassroots Democratic Initiative) is seeing steady success, referring to itself as a haven for voters disappointed by other parties.
Die PARTEI was founded in 2004 by the editor-in-chief of the popular German satirical magazine Titanic, and runs on a platform of rebuilding the Berlin Wall, waging a war of aggression on Lichtenstein to ‘force democratization’, and kidnapping the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It distorts slogans used by other parties to emphasize their ridiculousness and promised to change the first article of the German Constitution (‘Human dignity is inviolable’) so that the CEOs of some TV channels would not be considered to possess the same level of human dignity as others.
Running on this platform in the 2014 European Parliamentary elections, Die PARTEI became the first satirical party to win a seat in the European Parliament and went on to win a second seat in 2019. It has done this by running a self-proclaimed ‘populist campaign’. In September 2016, Martin Sonneborn, the leader of Die PARTEI, who currently sits on the culture and education committee in the European Parliament, made a speech demanding that Ireland be excluded from the EU for giving Apple a 13-billion-euro tax rebate.
Looking at the kind of platform these parties stand on, the cause of their sudden rise in popularity over the last decade becomes quite clear. Political disengagement has been on the rise around the world. But whereas the decline in voter engagement in poorer countries can be explained by the increase in regional conflicts and a lack of education, the presence of the same phenomenon in European countries is much more complex. Before 2019, turnout in European Parliamentary elections saw a decline in voter turnout in eight straight contests. In the UK, voter turnout has decreased from its peak of 77.7 percent at the 1992 general election, remaining low since. Most of the Labour Party’s recent by-election gains have been down to Conservative voters not showing up, not increased support for the party.
There is not a sole reason that can definitively explain this trend among Western countries. In the UK, it may be due to the increasing frequency of general elections, a feeling of powerlessness in the face of changing Prime Ministers, and the cost-of-living crisis that has long been forgotten in National political coverage. Europe has seen the emergence of extreme far-right parties that rely on cultural policies to generate support. But is the rise in support for far-right movements a cause or effect of disengagement? It is perhaps an attempt by politicians to offer something new, but one that has led to greater disaffection since it fails to address the real cause of disengagement among voters. What we really need is a permanent change in the way our politics works, whether by reforming the parliamentary system, starting with the anachronism that is the current House of Lords, or changing the voting system from the first-past-the-post system that maintains the dominance of the two main parties.
However, British voters might have to wait quite a while before any such changes happen. In its current use of the ‘Ming vase’ strategy, the Labour Party is refusing to propose any significant reform policies in the fear that its 20-point lead in the polls might be affected, ignoring the fact that this lead is maintained not due to any increase in support from voters but a decrease in support for the Conservatives. Perhaps, though, it is mindful of the fact that if a system of proportional representation were introduced that gave smaller parties a real chance, its lead would no longer be as dominant.
Image courtesy of Philipp Hutter via Wikimedia, ©2022. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
