Austrians get worked up about such things, too. In a European sort of way. Back in the nineties, the sitting President Thomas Klestil left his wife so he could marry his longtime girlfriend. When Frau Klestil appeared in the audience shortly afterward at a performance (at the Opera, I believe), she got a standing ovation of sympathy.

Klestil had been elected as the candidate of the conservative People's Party, formerly the official Catholic Party. The scandal damaged Klestil so badly that the largest party, the Austrian Social Democrats, didn't even put up a candidate against him for re-election. He ran as an independent and was overwhelmingly re-elected.

After he was re-elected, he quietly had a civil marriage to his girlfriend, who was then accepted as First Lady without any fuss. In Austria, civil marriages are not recognized by the Catholic Church, and church marriages aren't recongized by the state. So that avoided any problems around getting a Church annulment.

Klestil played a major role in getting the country past the political crisis that threatened early in 2000 when the party headed by Joerg Haider, who had been posing as a Mussolini wannabe, joined the government with the People's Party. Klestil was Austria's biggest international asset at that time. And made sure that Haider's party stayed within the bounds of democracy, although they're still pretty dang conservative. (Haider himself turned out to be less an aspiring Mussolini than someone who liked seeing himself on TV. Plus he got rich pandering to old Nazis.)

Klestil's constructive role in 2000 especially did a lot to repair the damage to Austria's reputation that stemmed from their previous President, the odious old bigot Kurt Waldheim.
Bruce Miller | Homepage | 08.09.08 - 3:54 pm | #