If you are following the news, the centre-left candidate Romano Prodi is winning. Steadily. Instead of Silvio Berlusconi, the Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s friend. And I hope for the Italians’ sake, Prodi is it.

Okay, so we are not in Italy and I am not an Italian. And we won’t probably know what will happen as soon as he is already in power.

Hopefully this year’s Austrian election, the Austrians too will think about whom to vote not only once but seven times before installing again the present government in autumn. That means, please, no more coalition between the Christian Democrats and the right parties. Or better yet, remove them totally from their seats.

But it seems there will be, shall we say, hindrances. And the question is who. Who is going to be the lesser evil?

There is the Bawag fiasco and, consequently, the National Workers’ Union president’s reason for leaving. Most of the people I talk to don’t see the leader of the socialists, Alfred Gusenbauer, charismatic enough to be the next chancellor. Sounds silly but perhaps that is the reason he cannot make it to the polls. There must be other hundreds of reasons.

I am hoping for the Greens. (Oh no, I am not campaigning for the Greenies.) But it seems this feat (a sure win over the Freedom Party and crashing it in the end) is hard to do.

But… you can feel it in the air. You hear the news. This government is hurrying up to change everything within a few months’ time. Not only for the immigrants’ situation in Austria but also the whole social system in the land.

And the fact that the Freedom Party’s behaviour on the last year’s Viennese election and the recent Volksbegehren was not charged. The provocation was so strong, it didn’t even hold water. That is the strange thing.

Anyway, one thing I notice is that when it comes to electioneering there is really no big difference between the Third World and the First World countries. The hitting below the belt is so common like an all-out throwing of intrigues and name-calling. Okay. I admit that we seldom hear that there are people shot dead because of the election. It is almost null and come to think of it, unthinkable.

What we can do is to see the bright side of life. That is, the humour of it all. While I read left and right the conservatives and the socialists’ hate declaration to each other I encountered this, a take on the Austrian politics, et al., through parody and satire.