Alexander Van der Bellen
Alexander "Sascha" Van der Bellen, also referred to by the abbreviation VdB, is an Austrian politician serving as the president of Austria since 2017. He previously served as a professor of economics at the University of Vienna, and after joining politics, as the spokesman of the Austrian Green Party.
Van der Bellen was born in Austria to Russian and Estonian parents who were refugees from the occupied Estonia, and he became a naturalized citizen of Austria together with his parents in 1958. He is a descendant of the former Russian Empire's aristocratic Van der Bellen family of patrilineal Dutch ancestry dating back to the 18th century.
He was a member of the National Council representing the Green Party there from 1994 to 2012, and served as both leader of the party as well as its parliamentary group.
He ran as a nominally independent candidate supported by the Greens in the 2016 presidential election, and finished second out of six in the first round before winning the second round against Norbert Hofer, a member of the Freedom Party. On 1 July, before he was due to be sworn into office, the results of the second round of voting were annulled by the Constitutional Court due to absentee votes being improperly counted too early, requiring the election to be re-held. On 4 December 2016, he won the ensuing election, taking approximately 54% of the vote.
Van der Bellen has described himself as a centrist liberal, and supports green and social liberal policies. As discussed in his 2015 book, he is supportive of the European Union and advocates European federalism. During the presidential election, he appealed to the political centre and was endorsed by the leaders of both the Social Democratic Party and the conservative People's Party. Van der Bellen is the second Green president of a European Union country and the first to be directly elected by popular vote.
Personal life
Origin and youth
In the 18th century, Van der Bellen's patrilineal ancestors emigrated from the Netherlands to the Russian Empire. During the Russian Civil War part of his family escaped from the Bolsheviks and migrated to the newly independent Estonia. Before this, Van der Bellen's grandfather Aleksander von der Bellen served as head of the civilian regional government in Pskov. In Estonia, the family changed its name from von der Bellen to Van der Bellen. In 1931, Van der Bellen's father Alexander married his Estonian mother, Alma Sieboldt in Kihelkonna, Saaremaa, Estonia. Subsequently, his father obtained Estonian citizenship as well. In 1940, Estonia was invaded, occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union. In February or March 1941, Van der Bellen's father, mother, and older sister Vivian-Diana moved to Nazi Germany; in line with the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty they were accepted as the so-called Volksdeutsche.Via Lauksargiai and a German resettlement camp in Werneck at Würzburg, Van der Bellen's parents moved to Vienna, where their son Alexander was born in 1944 and baptized into the Lutheran Church. As the Red Army approached Vienna, the family escaped to the Kauner valley in Tyrol, where his father later became active as a businessman again.
In 1954, after completing primary school in Innsbruck, Van der Bellen switched to the Academic Grammar School Innsbruck, where he took his Matura in 1962. Until this time Van der Bellen had Estonian citizenship like his parents; he obtained Austrian citizenship around 1958. According to Van der Bellen, he did not complete mandatory service in the Austrian Armed Forces. He underwent the medical examination for military service twice, the first one resulting in him being rated unfit. However, he successfully passed the second one. Later, he received several respites during his studies and due to his marriage. After that Van der Bellen was no longer summoned for service, due to his subsequent professorship.
Education
Van der Bellen studied economics at the University of Innsbruck and obtained a master's degree in 1966. With his dissertation Kollektive Haushalte und gemeinwirtschaftliche Unternehmungen: Probleme ihrer Koordination he was awarded the title of Dr. rer. oec in 1970. From 1968 to 1971 he served as scientific assistant to Clemens August Andreae at the Institute for Public Finance at the University of Innsbruck, and from 1972 to 1974 as a research fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center. He was university assistant at the Institute for Public Finance at the University of Innsbruck and was awarded the qualification as university lecturer in 1975. He established friendship with Turkish economist Murat R. Sertel, with whom he worked on decision and preference theories and later on published several articles and discussion papers.In 1976 Van der Bellen became associate professor at the University of Innsbruck, where he remained until 1980. During this time he moved to Vienna to study and research from 1977 to 1980 at the Federal Academy of Public Administration. From 1980 to 1999 he was extraordinary university professor for economics at the University of Vienna. Between 1990 and 1994 he there also became dean of the faculty for economics at University of Vienna. In October 1999 he became parliamentary leader of the Greens in the National Council and thus resigned as university professor in January 2009. Van der Bellen retired in February 2009.
Van der Bellen's research focused on planning and financing procedures in the public sector, infrastructure financing, fiscal policy, public expenditure, government regulation policy, public undertakings, and environmental and transport policy. He has published in professional journals such as the Die Betriebswirtschaft, Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, Public Choice, Wirtschaftspolitische Blätter and the Zeitschrift für öffentliche und gemeinwirtschaftliche Unternehmen.
Family
Van der Bellen married when he was 18 years old and became a father for the first time at 19. His relationship with Brigitte lasted over 50 years, until they divorced in 2015. He had two sons with her. Since December 2015 Van der Bellen has been married to a longtime friend and managing director of the Greens Club, Doris Schmidauer. He lives in Vienna and in Kaunertal, Tyrol.Religion
As a young man Van der Bellen left the Lutheran Church, because he was upset about his local pastor. According to his own words he does not believe in the one God, but in a "message or vision", which in his view the New Testament states. However, in an interview in 2019 he stated, that he had rejoined the Protestant Church of the Augsburg Confession the same year.Freemason
According to his own statement, Van der Bellen joined the only existing Freemason chapter in Innsbruck at the time, although he participated at meetings for a year, which he described as "being active". "After that, as a purely passive member, I paid the membership fee for about 10 years and finally left on my explicit request", Van der Bellen in a ZIB 2 elections interview with Armin Wolf. According to Van der Bellen, he is no longer a Freemason.Estonian citizenship
After Van der Bellen's victory in the 2016 Austrian presidential elections, President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves congratulated him. The Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs have stated that Van der Bellen could get back his Estonian passport at any time. This is possible because Van der Bellen's parents were citizens of Estonia as of 16 June 1940; children of such parents are automatically accepted as citizens. Urmas Paet, former foreign minister of Estonia and MEP said: "the election results are a reason to congratulate Austrians twice. For Estonia and its people, the fact that Austria has elected an Estonian citizen as its president also plays a role."Nickname
Van der Bellen is sometimes also called "Sascha" by his friends, colleagues, and within his party.Political career
Joining politics
Van der Bellen was a member of the Social Democratic Party from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s, but his interests later turned towards the environmental movement. His former postgraduate Peter Pilz, back then the spokesman of the Green Party, brought Van der Bellen into his party. Van der Bellen later described these changes as a development "from an arrogant anti-capitalist to a generous left-liberal", although the latter self-image in his autobiography of 2015 also changed into a "liberal Anglo-Saxon coinage".In 1992, Van der Bellen was nominated by the Greens for the office of the President of the Court of Audit; he was defeated by the ÖVP-close Franz Fiedler. After the Greens suffered significant losses in the 1995 legislative elections on 17 December, Van der Bellen took over the party chairmanship from Christoph Chorherr in December 1997 and remained until October 2008, being the longest-serving spokesman in the history of the Austrian Greens, with almost eleven years in office.
He assumed chairmanship with the party having 4.8% approval in polls at that time. He led the party through three elections, each higher than the last: in the 1999 legislative elections the party got 7.4% of the vote, in the 2002 legislative elections it got 9.5% of the vote, and in the 2006 legislative elections the party got 11.05% of the vote.
After losses in the 2008 legislative elections, in which the Green Party's voteshare dropped to 10.11%, Van der Bellen, dubbed "the green professor" by the media, resigned on 3 October 2008 as spokesman of the Green Party. He handed over the office to the Third President of the National Council at the time, Eva Glawischnig. As designated spokesperson she was elected administrative party leader on 24 October and later officially endorsed and sworn in by the party congress.