Viktor Klima

Infobox Chancellor
name = Viktor Klima
nationality = Austrian


order = Chancellor of Austria
term_start = January 28 1997
term_end = February 4 2000
predecessor = Franz Vranitzky
successor = Wolfgang Schüssel
birth_date = birth date and age|1947|6|4|mf=y
birth_place = Schwechat, Lower Austria
party = SPÖ
religion = Roman Catholic

Viktor Klima (born 4 June 1947), a Social Democratic Austrian ex-politician and manager, was Federal Chancellor of Austria ("Bundeskanzler") from 1997 till his resignation in 2000.

Early tenure as nationalised industry manager and politician

Born in Schwechat, Lower Austria, Klima started working for the then state-owned OMV oil company in 1969 and remained with the company up to the beginning of his political career in 1992, in his later years serving as a member of their management board. Although Klima was then unknown to the majority of Austrians, in 1992 Federal Chancellor Franz Vranitzky made him Minister of Transportation and Nationalised Industry, a position Klima held till 1996, when he became Minister of Finance for a year.

Austrian Chancellor and Social Democratic Party Chairman

In 1997, upon Vranitzky's resignation, Klima was elected chairman of the Social Democratic party and was sworn in as Federal Chancellor of Austria, having renewed the grand coalition between his own party (SPÖ) and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), with Wolfgang Schüssel serving as his Vice-Chancellor.

Probably influenced by other European leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, under Klima's chairmanship the Austrian Social Democrats played down their allegiance to Marxism and thus to their own political roots and very clearly continued their move from the political left towards the centre, frequently using "spin doctors" and embracing populism as a political strategy.

For example, further privatisations took place, and several public services that had been subsumed under the policies of the welfare state were tentatively reduced. As a consequence, a high percentage of the party's traditional working class clientèle, dissatisfied with Klima and his party, left to support Jörg Haider's right-wing Freedom Party. However, just as his predecessor Vranitzky, Klima repeatedly and publicly announced that under no circumstances was he prepared to enter into a coalition with Haider's party.

Following the elections of October 1999, in which the Social Democrats sustained heavy losses, Viktor Klima stepped down as the chairman of his party and was succeeded in this capacity by Alfred Gusenbauer. As chancellor he was succeeded by Wolfgang Schüssel from the People's Party, who formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party in February 2000.

Manager in the automotive industry

A few weeks later, with the help of his friend Gerhard Schröder, Klima took up a senior management position with Volkswagen in Argentina at a time when the country was in a deep economic crisis. As an international industry manager Klima was clearly more successful than as an Austrian politician; he became General Manager of Volkswagen's entire South American operations in mid-2006, and is under contract until 2010. Klima's background in politics as well as in economy predestines him for networking, a capability he has continued to cultivate on the highest level, such as with Argentina's current president, Néstor Kirchner and his predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde.

Private life

Klima has been married three times. He has a grown-up son and a daughter by his first marriage. He divorced his second wife, Sonja (a former elementary school teacher) in 2004 after commencing a relationship with his current wife Claudia, a former Volkswagen accountant. The affair had been widely publicized in Austria. He has had the second child from her in 2007.

Klima used to be a heavy smoker and was probably one of the last politicians who smoked in public. During his premiership, he was hospitalized due to a nicotine-related illness.

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