GRAZ, Austria – That the conservative mayor would win again and serve a fifth term was considered a foregone conclusion in Austria’s second-largest city, Graz, a place where it is not uncommon to encounter local residents who be proudly dressed in traditional lederhosen and dirndls.
Elke Kahr, the city’s Communist Party leader, was equally convinced that she would lose again to the slick heir to a trading dynasty that had run the city for 18 years.
So she was just as surprised as the journalist who told her last September’s election news: the Communists had emerged victorious and she would be the next mayor.
“He was totally stunned – and I thought it was a joke,” Ms Kahr recalled her election night conversation with the reporter at City Hall.
Newspapers across Europe began calling the city “Leningraz,” a nickname the new mayor laughs at.
“Yes, 100 percent, I am a convinced Marxist,” said Ms. Kahr in her mayor’s office, flanked by the used Ikea planks that she used to decorate the stately furniture of her predecessor, Siegfried Nagl, of the Austrian People’s Party, or .VP.
Ms. Kahr, 60, is now trying to “redistribute wealth” as much as her role allows, she said.
But that does not mean that its Communist Party of Austria, or KPÖ., intends to expropriate the bourgeoisie or abolish the free market. Ms Kahr said her goal was “to alleviate the problems of the people in our city as much as possible”.
To an outsider visiting, the city’s problems may not be immediately apparent.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger visits his hometown of Graz, he strolls through clean streets past modern, affordable apartment buildings.
But there is poverty and many people struggle with rising prices and fixed wages.
And for nearly two decades, not without controversy, Mrs. Kahr has been dipping into her own pocket to help people pay for unexpectedly high electricity bills or a new washing machine. She listens to a problem, asks for a bank account and transfers money, usually with a maximum of a few hundred euros.
During her political career, she has given away about three quarters of her after-tax salary. Since she became a councilor in 2005, Ms. Kahr’s donations have amounted to more than a million euros, or about $1,020,000.
Political opponents have accused her of vote-buying, but “they are free to do the same,” Ms Kahr noted. “Besides, it’s not charity,” she added. “I’m just convinced that politicians earn too much.”
As mayor, her salary of about $120,000 after taxes is more than four times the national average, and the $32,000 she keeps for herself is plenty. She rides the city buses and trams, shops at budget stores and rents a modest apartment, filled with books and records, where she lives with her partner, a retired KPÖ. officially.
Austria has a long tradition of socialism and has created a comprehensive social security system. Healthcare is universal and universities are free.
But voters have largely shunned the Communist Party since the Austrians sat in the front row when the Soviet Union violently crushed a popular uprising in neighboring Hungary in 1956. The KPÖ. has not won a national parliament seat in any election since.
The Great Lecture
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However, Graz is an anomaly: With the party’s focus on housing, charismatic communists have sat on the city council since the 1990s.
No one has been as popular as Mrs. Kahr.
Supporters and critics alike describe her as approachable, pleasant and a direct shooter. The grassroots often compliment her for being “not like a politician”, but more like a social worker.
As mayor, who rules in a coalition with Social Democrats and Greens, she now has more leverage to steer policies in the direction she prefers.
So far, that has included capping sewage and waste costs for homes, as well as renting city-owned homes. She has ensured that thousands of residents are more eligible for a greatly reduced annual pass for public transport.
And she has cut the marketing budget for the entire city, as well as subsidies for all political parties.
Kurt Hohensinner, the new head of the Ö.VP in Graz, called these efforts more symbolic than substantive. He predicted how the city would fare under Mrs. Kahr’s leadership, saying: “Graz will not suffer from communism, but from standstill.”
Notably, Ms. Kahr has also canceled several prestigious projects, including a proposal led by Ö.VP to give Graz’s 300,000 residents their own metro line.
Instead, the city will soon have a new office for social and housing services and more social apartments.
Housing, says Ms Kahr, is most dear to her heart. It is also the issue that has built the communist brand in Graz.
Fearing destruction at the end of the Cold War, they opened a tenant emergency hotline, where they offered free legal advice about questionable leases, impending evictions and landlords’ inability to return security deposits.
Rich and poor, left and right, phone calls and word of mouth: the communists care. Often Mrs. Kahr answered the phone.
As mayor, Mrs. Kahr tries to be a familiar face on the city streets.
Mrs. Kahr jumped off the bus in Triestersiedlung, one of the poorer neighborhoods of the city, which is characterized by its 1,200 subsidized apartments, Mrs. Kahr complimented the owner on her car, a rare Soviet-made Lada, and then drove through the shaded courtyard of into a social housing block.
The facades of the apartment buildings were freshly painted and on this sunny afternoon the low-income residents basked on their recently built balconies. It is a luxury that most private apartments in Graz lack and one that Mrs. Kahr insisted on as a councillor.
While distributing raised flower beds for residents to grow their own tomatoes and herbs, one approached and praised “Elke” for “still coming to visit us now that you’re mayor.”
Mrs. Kahr reminded the woman that she too had grown up there.
Mrs. Kahr was given up for adoption at birth and spent the early years of her life in a children’s home. Just before her 4th birthday, she was adopted. The story goes that she cheekily asked a visiting couple for a banana sticking out of their shopping bag; Impressed by the little girl’s lack of shyness, the couple adopted her.
Her father, a welder, and her mother, a waitress turned housewife, rented a cabin in Triestersiedlung. They took water from a well and took care of chickens, ducks and rabbits. Their toilet was an outhouse.
Some of her playmates lived in barracks left over from World War II and trudged through the snow in sandals.
“If you grow up in this social environment, you can only pursue a socially just world,” Ms Kahr said.
Yet she never felt that she lacked anything: she remembered devouring the books in the housing project’s library. On Saturdays, when the family visited the public bathhouse, little Elke made a splurge by extending her time in the tub to 30 minutes.
As a young adult, she drove to rock concerts all over Europe (she likes most music, she said, including socially conscious rap, “though Eminem not so much”) and tracked down her biological mother, a farm girl. Her biological father was a student from Iran.
The meeting wasn’t meant to bond, but “to tell her that regardless of the reasons for her decision, it was perfect for me,” Ms. Kahr said.
Ms. Kahr was reprimanded for growing up for “talking like a communist” and she was 18 when she decided to find out why.
She looked up the party’s address in the phone book and walked to the local headquarters.
“She was a godsend,” said Ernest Kaltenegger, her mentor and predecessor as the party’s local head. “Not like other young people who burn bright for a while — she meant it.”
When the bank branch where she worked closed at 24, Mr. Kaltenegger persuaded her to become the second employee of the KPÖ of Graz. During a six-month study in Moscow in 1989, she followed the impassioned debates about reforms there, believing they would “turn the corner”.
Two years later, the Soviet Union fell apart.
Mrs. Kahr comforted her older comrades and concentrated on her young son Franz.
In the 1990s, Mr. Kaltenegger campaigned for the installation of bathrooms in all social rented apartments in Graz, turning the communists into a local political mainstay. He later moved to the state level on the condition that Mrs. Kahr take over the communist mantle in Graz.
She did and she started stumbling. She led the party in the 2008 elections and lost half of its voters.
But within five years it had made the Communists the second strongest party in the city. A likely factor in the party’s victory last year was growing discontent in Graz over a construction boom that took over the last plots of undeveloped land. In a by KPÖ. organized referendum in 2018, an unusually high turnout effectively blocked the land’s repurposing of an agricultural college, a momentous victory for the party.
Often criticism comes not from Ms. Kahr’s work, but from her unabashed embrace of ideology. For example, her admiration for the former Yugoslavia, a multi-ethnic and non-aligned state ruled by a dictator, is evidence of “historic stubbornness,” said Christian Fleck, a sociology professor at the University of Graz.
But voters don’t seem to care, with her June approval rating of 65 percent.
As mayor, she continues to regularly meet people in need of help, as she did when she was a councilor, recording more than 3,000 visits a year from single mothers, the unemployed or those in precarious living situations.
Craving a cigarette, a vice she can’t throw up, Mrs. Kahr pondered why communism failed elsewhere.
“It just depends,” she said, “whether the leaders live it too.”
