Numbers Gaffe Caps Acrimonious Austrian Virus Budget Debate

(Bloomberg) -- A rancorous three-day debate in Austria’s parliament about the country’s 2020 budget culminated in the last-second revelation of an embarrassing mistake in the Finance Ministry’s legal text that would have capped government spending for the year at 102,389.24 euros ($113,500).

Just seconds before the lawmakers started their final vote in Vienna, the opposition Social Democrats’ budgetary speaker Jan Krainer interrupted the procedure by pointing out to Finance Minister Gernot Bluemel a missing reference to “in millions of euros” in a crucial table of the legal text. The session was interrupted and will continue Friday.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has received universal praise for quickly and successfully dealing with the pandemic, yet his economic aid program, launched with the vow to do “whatever it takes,” has yet to gain traction. Over half a million Austrians are unemployed and small companies have complained that aid packages aren’t reaching them.

While the coalition government with the environmentalist Greens has a solid majority and there’s no doubt the budget will eventually gain approval, Thursday’s episode highlights the strains of a first-time finance minister dealing with an unprecedented situation.

Bluemel’s gaffe provoked howls of scorn on the opposition benches -- also including the nationalist Freedom Party and the business-friendly Neos -- which had previously unsuccessfully challenged the finance minister’s refusal to propose a budget with numbers updated for the impact of the coronavirus crisis.

Bluemel had argued in the debate that the widely varying predictions for the economic fallout from the crisis would have made any revenue forecasts futile. Instead, he stuck to the draft budget already presented before the virus struck, only requesting permission to overspend by 28 billion euros to fund the government’s support package.

In a small concession to the opposition, Bluemel’s ministry filed a minor two-and-a-half page update to the budget law that broke down the overall aid efforts into four separate chapters, a change that introduced the faulty table into the legal text.

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