Alfred Gusenbauer led the Social Democratic Youth in Austria for many years before he later became leader of his party in 2000. He was one of the leading figures of the Vienna based International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) in the eighties. When I was elected European Secretary of IUSY in the nineties he was still ever-present in the organisation’s activities lending his advice to all sorts of initiatives that we undertook at that time.

Gusenbauer is now expected to become the next Austrian Chancellor after leading Austria's Social Democrats to victory in this weekend’s elections. His victory confounded all the opinion polls and he will now be invited to form a government. He will surely keep his distance from the two hard-right parties but cannot obtain a majority with the Greens. The likely outcome will be to follow last year's example in Germany and try to form a grand coalition of Social and Christian Democrats.

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