The numbers arrived last week like a small mercy: inflation down to two percent, the lowest in months. Yet for Karin, a mother of two in Linz, and thousands like her across Austria, the relief feels distant, almost theoretical, according to derStandard. The damage, it seems, has already been done.
“2019 was a different world,” says political researcher David Pfarrhofer, and the data backs him up with brutal clarity. Back then, when the word “pandemic” meant something happening elsewhere, only one in five Austrians worried about their finances worsening. Today? More than one in three, 37 percent, watch their bank accounts shrink year after year.
The Market Institute’s survey, commissioned by DER STANDARD, paints a portrait of a nation recalibrating its expectations downward. Only eight percent feel better off than twelve months ago. The rest either tread water or sink slowly.
Families with children bear the heaviest burden. Nearly half report financial strain, juggling groceries, heating bills, and the relentless arithmetic of survival. These aren’t abstract statistics, they’re dinner table conversations about skipping the summer holiday, buying store-brand cereal, canceling streaming services.
The saving patterns tell their own story. Forty-two percent refuse to touch their insurance payments. Thirty nine percent won’t cut mobile or internet service modern necessities, not luxuries. But dining out? New clothes? That weekend trip to the mountains? Those luxuries belong to the old Austria, the one that existed before the compound crises of pandemic, war, and energy shocks.
Interestingly, one-third refuse to compromise on groceries, a small act of defiance against austerity. But household items, alcohol, restaurants these get slashed without hesitation. The older generation, perhaps remembering leaner times, saves more aggressively than the young.
What Austrians want now is intervention. Sixty-two percent demand the government act decisively on energy prices. Fifty-one percent support state control over food costs. The sacred free market, it turns out, loses its charm when heating bills double.
Yet priorities shift with the political winds. Healthcare tops the urgency list at 68 percent, followed by elder care and inflation. Climate change, once a rallying cry, now matters deeply to only 30 percent. Seventeen percent dismiss it entirely a remarkable fall from grace.
The car, meanwhile, remains untouchable, especially for rural voters and the over-fifties. “The sacred cow of the older generation,” Pfarrhofer calls it, noting how quickly anti-intervention principles vanish when gas prices climb.
Austria isn’t collapsing, but it’s contracting expectations, budgets, dreams. The world of 2019, when money flowed easier and worries ran lighter, feels impossibly far away.
