2011: Road Sign Agreement

The road to the 2011 agreement on town signs in Carinthia was a rocky one. The "road sign storm" of 1972 swept away bilingual town signs in 205 municipalities. In 1976, a threshold of 25% Slovenian speakers was set for a bilingual sign but this solution was never implemented. In 2001 the Constitutional Court lifted this quota, leading to conflict between the governor of Carinthia, Jörg Haider, and the president of the court, Ludwig Adamovich. In 2002, Federal Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel started to search for a compromise but this added fuel to the dispute and resulted in the symbolic relocation of town signs. What was, at times, an absurd dispute went on for nearly a decade until 2011, when an agreement was brought about by the state secretary Josef Ostermayer. The agreement provided for 164 bilingual town signs in municipalities where at least 17.5% of the population were Slovenian speakers. Since then, it seems that the decades-long conflict has largely been resolved.