Az osztrák Richelieu

The thinking of the generation of Austrian politicians born in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was fundamentally determined by the unique set of identities and diversity that gave a special dynamics to the nation-consciousness awakening in the First Republic. The aforementioned aspects had a decisive influence on the intellectual aspect of Ignaz Seipel, decisive politician of the independent „Remnant State”, in the words of Clemenceau, and on his relations to the democratic institutional system. His contemporaries and the majority of the First Austrian Republic’s population considered the new state as unviable. The Christian Social Party represented the ideology of Austria's independence, partly compulsory, partly in interest or in conviction. Ignaz Seipel shaped and defined the character of his own party for a decade and the political system of Austria in the twenties. „His sensibility to the authoritarian and professional-oriented governance influenced the slow erosion of the multi-party system decisively and promoted the gradual gaining of authoritarian governance.”