Abstract
This chapter examines two parties, Team Stronach in Austria and Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OLʼANO) in Slovakia, which were founded by businessmen with substantial resources but a minimal cadre base. Both leaders, Frank Stronach and Igor Matovič, used mainly anti-establishment and anti-party appeals. Stronach presented a technocratic political message, while Matovič displayed an attractive style of performance based on emotion and provocation. Team Stronach was a highly centralised aggregate of a handful of professional politicians, but its leader quickly lost the initial enthusiasm after a lukewarm result in the first parliamentary elections and the party had no chance of survival. Matovič created an even more exclusive organisation, and his concept of OLʼANO as a platform for independent candidates created a party with weak cohesion. However, he was much more methodical, systematic and persistent. This proved to be a sustainable strategy, in the medium term at least. Matovič’s OLʼANO also shows a good way of exploiting the opportunity structure.
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Notes
- 1.
In practice, these constituencies are divided further, but that is irrelevant for the purposes of this book.
- 2.
When Stronach became involved in Austrian politics directly and actively, the activities of his institute were rolled back. At the time of writing this book (mid-2019), the most recent item on the Frank Stronach Institute Facebook profile was dated 5 December 2013.
- 3.
The failure to cross the 5 per cent threshold in Tyrol was due to internal disputes among the party’s regional candidates.
- 4.
This would involve collecting 100–500 signatures in each state (according to size) and at least 2600 signatures in total.
- 5.
Interestingly, in comparison with other candidate list leaders, Stronach participated in the fewest television debates overall. Besides the BZÖ chair, Joseph Bucher, he was also the candidate who was the least mentioned as a potential chancellor, if citizens were, hypothetically, to elect the holder of that office directly. What is more, Stronach’s popularity was in slow but continuous decline from the beginning of the campaign to election day (Dolezal et al. 2014: 77, 83–84).
- 6.
Article 8(4) of the statutes was significant: ‘The respective chairman is entitled, in the event of his departure from the party for whatever reason, to appoint during his lifetime a person from the circle of founding members until the election of a new chairman with all rights and duties connected with the function of the chairman. This person takes the place of the retiring chairman’ (Team Stronach 2013b: 4).
- 7.
Sulík and Matovič claimed that SaS properly paid for the advertisements, but, with volume discounts, the total sum cannot have been large. Given the lack of transparency in party-political funding in Slovakia at the time, this statement cannot be verified.
- 8.
The Christian Democrats won the same number of seats as OĽANO.
- 9.
Formally, OĽANO changed its name to OĽANO-NOVA to stand in this election, thus accommodating one of the small right-wing entities, whose acronym was NOVA. They did so to avoid a formal election coalition, which faces a higher electoral threshold in Slovakia than parties standing on their own, and they were not sure whether they would be able to cross this threshold.
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Hloušek, V., Kopeček, L., Vodová, P. (2020). Two Tycoons and Their One-Man Shows. In: The Rise of Entrepreneurial Parties in European Politics. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41916-5_4
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