1996: Waltraud Klasnic Becomes the First Woman to Lead a Provincial Government

On 23 January 1996, the election of Waltraud Klasnic marked the first time in Austria that a woman had been chosen to lead a provincial government. The Styrian People’s Party (ÖVP) had suffered losses at the 1995 elections, after which Josef Krainer jun. resigned as provincial governor. Gerhard Hirschmann, a member of the Styrian parliament, had been designated as Krainer’s successor but he declined the offer and so Waltraud Klasnic, until then State Minister for the Economy, became governor. She deliberately used the male form of the term governor in German: Landeshauptmann.

Her heartfelt reaction to the Lassing mining disaster in 1998 and her economic policies, which included the creation of a car manufacturing cluster in Styria, led to an 11% increase in votes at the 2000 provincial elections—an upswing that was followed in the 2005 elections by a downturn, the result of internal struggles within the Styrian ÖVP. Waltraud Klasnic resigned and was succeed as governor by Franz Voves of the Social Democrat Party (SPÖ).

Born in 1945 into modest circumstances, the politician remained socially committed and active in public life after her resignation. She was the first president of the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria, president of the Dachverband Hospiz Österreich, an umbrella organisation for hospices in Austria, and chair of the commission set up to investigate cases of abuse by members of the Catholic Church in Austria.