When I returned to Austria in 2004 after almost fifteen years abroad, I found myself needing an introduction to my own country’s politics.
I had disconnected so completely that I barely recognised the political landscape. Parties still carried familiar names, but names have a habit of surviving long after their original meaning has disappeared.
Wolfgang Schüssel was Chancellor.
Nominally, the conservatives held power, although I had long since stopped regarding most European conservative parties as particularly conservative in anything but branding. Nevertheless, Schüssel struck me as reasonably competent, perhaps even refreshingly so by contemporary standards.
Then came Alfred Gusenbauer.
The Socialist years.
I remembered the Austria I had left behind before moving abroad, and I remembered that period with little nostalgia. Gusenbauer, at least in my estimation, managed to make those earlier years seem almost restrained. The country appeared to drift, confidence weakened, and political ambition increasingly detached itself from practical governance.
Still, I told myself what countless voters throughout history have told themselves.
Surely this is the bottom.
Surely things cannot deteriorate much further.
I was wrong.
Werner Faymann followed.
To me, he embodied the archetype of the apparatchik: polished, disciplined, permanently smiling, and seemingly capable of dismantling institutional strength while maintaining the reassuring appearance that everything remained under control. It was politics performed with impeccable manners and profoundly uninspiring consequences.
Again I reached for the comforting illusion.
This must be the lowest point.
There cannot possibly be another step downward.
Reality, once more, proved considerably more imaginative.
Christian Kern arrived.
Remarkably, he made Faymann appear almost distinguished by comparison.
That alone should have served as a warning.
Then came the Kurz years, followed by the political turbulence that accompanied and followed Sebastian Kurz’s departure. Coalitions shifted, crises multiplied, confidence continued to erode, and Austrian politics increasingly resembled a theatre production in which every new act somehow managed to be less convincing than the previous one.
And here we are today.
Throughout those two decades I have repeatedly caught myself entertaining exactly the same thought.
*”Now we’ve reached the bottom.”*
Every single time, reality has responded with quiet amusement.
*”Not yet.”*
Perhaps that is the real lesson.
People speak of rock bottom as though history contains a clearly marked floor—a final point beyond which decline simply refuses to continue. It is an attractive idea because it suggests that deterioration possesses its own natural limit, that societies eventually recognise the abyss beneath their feet and instinctively step back.
History offers very little evidence for such optimism.
Where, exactly, was the bottom that should have persuaded North Koreans to revolt?
Which year was so unbearable that further decline became impossible?
The question answers itself.
Political decay rarely announces its conclusion.
It simply becomes normal.
Each new deterioration is measured not against healthy institutions but against yesterday’s dysfunction. Expectations adjust. Standards sink. Yesterday’s outrage becomes today’s routine, and tomorrow’s outrage will one day enjoy the same comfortable familiarity.
Decline is not usually a cliff.
It is an escalator.
It moves slowly enough that many passengers scarcely notice they are descending.
That is perhaps the cruellest aspect of institutional decay.
There is no natural law requiring history to stop becoming worse simply because we have grown tired of watching it happen.
Quick endings are, paradoxically, an act of mercy.
Most civilisations are not granted that luxury.
Their decline unfolds one compromise, one election, one bureaucracy, one abandoned principle at a time—until eventually people forget that the staircase once led upward.