Knittelfeld Putsch - Events at Knittelfeld

Events At Knittelfeld

On September 7, a party meeting was held at Knittelfeld, but the party chair and Vice Chancellor of Austria at that time, Susanne Riess-Passer, was not present. Most of the functionaries attending represented the opposition within the FPÖ of its traditional nationalist right wing.

The key symbolic moment of the meeting was a public tearing of a compromise paper between Riess-Passer and Haider by the Carinthian delegate Scheuch (some witnesses report that Haider instructed Scheuch to publicly tear the paper, so even though it was Scheuch who actually tore the paper up, it was Haider in reality who was engaging in the destruction of the accord). The following day, Riess-Passer, Minister of Finance Karl-Heinz Grasser (who was later reappointed in this position by the ÖVP) and the chairman of the FPÖ parliamentary club, Peter Westenthaler, announced their resignation, as did some other relatively pragmatic functionaries. Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel then renounced the coalition pact, which led to early elections being called, where the FPÖ lost approximately two thirds of its voters of 1999 and fell from 26.9% of the public vote to 10,0%.