AUSTRIA: The Ball Rolls Left

Even before the polls closed, a downcast politician at the Vienna headquarters of Austria's conservative People's Party was able to forecast the results. "The ball rolls," he said resignedly, "and it rolls to the left." When all of the nearly 5,000,000 ballots were counted last week, the Socialist Party of Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, 60, had won a majority of the voteĀ—the first for any party since the founding of the Austrian Republic in 1918.

One of the first statesmen to congratulate Kreisky was West German Chancellor Willy Brandt. That was particularly appropriate. Both...

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