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Karl Lueger

Karl Lueger (24 October 1844-10 March 1910) was an Austrian politician who served as Mayor of Vienna from 8 April 1897 to 10 March 1910 (succeeding Josef Strobach and preceding Josef Neumayer) and as a cofounder of the Christian Social Party.

Biography[]

Karl Lueger was born in Wieden, Austrian Empire (now a district of Vienna, Austria) in 1844, and he established his own lawyer's office in Vienna in 1874 and was elected to the city council a year later as a liberal. However, he later campaigned against Mayor Cajetan Felder's liberal city government and became an anti-corruption activist; except for a break from 1876 to 1878, he would continue to serve on the City Council until his death in 1910. In 1891, he co-founded the Christian Social Party, which won two-thirds of seats on Vienna's city council in 1895 and ended decades of liberal rule. While Emperor Franz Joseph loathed Lueger and saw him as a dangerous revolutionary, he ultimately confirmed his appointment as Mayor in 1897. Lueger was also controversially a zealous Catholic who refused to include Social Democrats, Pan-Germans, or Jews in the municipal administration while securing good treatment for Czech immigrants, and he overtly supported the anti-Semitic voelkisch movement and restrictions on Jewish immigration. However, Lueger's political mentor Ignaz Mandl was Jewish, as were many of his friends; he famously excused this fact by proclaiming, "I decide who is a Jew," and it was likely that his anti-Semitic statements were merely part of his pose to obtain votes. Lueger was also first elected to the Imperial Parliament in 1885 and to the Lower Austria Landtag in 1890. Lueger appealed to conservative Catholic women who persuaded their husbands to vote for the Christian Socials and raised their children with conservative values, as well as to anti-Semitic petty bourgeois tradesmen. He died in 1910 at the age of 65, and his anti-Semitic populism was theorized to have influenced both the Austrofascists and Adolf Hitler.

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