Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP)
EU RANK: 118 (Tier 3: Moderate Performance)
The Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) is a centre‑right, Christian‑democratic and conservative party. After heavy losses in the 2024 election it won around 26.3% of the vote and 51 seats, falling behind the FPÖ but remaining a major force. In early 2025 the ÖVP formed a three‑party coalition with the SPÖ and NEOS that excluded the FPÖ, and Christian Stocker became chancellor and party leader.
DMI risk narratives
Disinformation and alternative media
Compared with FPÖ, the ÖVP does not rely on a strongly conspiratorial alternative media sphere, but it has invested in its own communication channels that blur the line between party PR and news. Historically it maintained party newspapers such as Neues Volksblatt (later Oberösterreichische Volksblatt), which functioned as a regional party outlet until it ceased publication at the start of 2025. In 2021 the party launched the online platform Zur‑sache.at, presented as an information blog but widely understood as a vehicle for direct messaging and agenda‑setting outside traditional journalistic formats.
These initiatives give the ÖVP structured capacity to frame political issues on owned channels that resemble journalism without the same editorial checks. However, the available information does not link Zur‑sache.at or other ÖVP‑aligned outlets to systematic dissemination of verifiably false claims at a scale comparable to far‑right ecosystems; the concern is more about soft propaganda and one‑sided narratives than about overt disinformation. In DMI terms, this suggests a medium risk in the disinformation/alternative media dimension: an established governing party using quasi‑media tools to shape narratives but not at the extreme end of conspiratorial content.
Foreign influence and external alignments
ÖVP is a pro‑European, mainstream conservative party closely integrated into EU institutions and the European People’s Party family. No information associates it with structured ties to authoritarian foreign powers comparable to those alleged for FPÖ and Russia. Major foreign‑policy controversies around the party in recent years have focused on its management of relations with neighbouring EU states and migration policy rather than on documented external information operations.
Some corruption and media‑spending scandals under former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz had an international echo, but they were primarily about domestic influence over Austrian media rather than foreign capture. In the DMI framework, this points to a low‑to‑medium foreign‑influence risk score: the party is deeply embedded in EU structures and Western alliances, yet its past willingness to instrumentalise media and institutions has raised broader questions about the resilience of Austria’s democratic safeguards.
Media capture, advertising and public service media
Our media‑influence dataset portrays the ÖVP as a central actor in Austria’s long‑standing pattern of political influence over public service media and commercial news outlets. During the Kurz era, investigative reporting and court‑audit findings pointed to a system in which government advertising budgets and public funds were steered toward friendly media in exchange for favourable coverage, particularly in the tabloid sector. The ÖVP also maintains influence through appointments to the supervisory boards of ORF, the public broadcaster, which contributes to perceptions that editorial independence is vulnerable to partisan pressure.
The creation of Zur‑sache.at and the party’s history of operating its own newspapers show an ongoing strategy to combine owned outlets with leverage over mainstream platforms. International monitoring (CMPF, RSF and others) has repeatedly highlighted structural weaknesses in Austrian media governance, and the ÖVP, as the long‑time dominant governing party, appears across these analyses as a key beneficiary and shaper of the status quo. From a DMI perspective, this justifies a medium‑to‑high risk rating on media‑capture behaviour: extensive use of state advertising, regulatory influence and party‑linked outlets to shape the information environment, even if not primarily through extremist or openly false content.
Corruption, litigation and institutional integrity
The ÖVP has been at the centre of major corruption and integrity investigations in the last decade, especially around former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz who resigned in 2021 after prosecutors opened a corruption probe into allegations that public funds had been used to secure favourable media coverage and to influence opinion polling; parliament subsequently lifted his immunity. In 2024 he was convicted of perjury for misleading a parliamentary committee about a key appointment to the state holding company ÖBAG, receiving a suspended sentence, before being acquitted on appeal in 2025.
In addition, former Finance Minister Karl‑Heinz Grasser, who had served under both FPÖ and ÖVP colours, was convicted of corruption in 2020 in connection with large‑scale privatisations and tax issues, with Austria’s Supreme Court upholding the conviction (but reducing the sentence) in 2025. These cases, alongside broader concerns about patronage and the use of public resources for political advantage, give the ÖVP a medium‑to‑high DMI risk on the corruption and institutional‑integrity axis: the judiciary is functioning, but repeated high‑level cases signal underlying vulnerabilities in the party’s relationship to clean governance and media pluralism.
Press freedom, harassment and treatment of critical media
The ÖVP’s rhetoric towards the press is generally less openly hostile, but its time in government saw important structural pressures on independent journalism. The combination of skewed advertising allocations, close relationships with certain tabloids and efforts to influence ORF’s governance created an environment in which outlets critical of Kurz’s government feared being penalised financially or sidelined in access. International organisations monitoring media freedom in Austria have documented these patterns and raised concerns that they undermined equal conditions for media and encouraged self‑censorship.
There is less evidence in our database of direct orchestrated harassment campaigns against individual journalists by ÖVP figures, in contrast to more aggressive far‑right actors, but the party’s role in shaping a clientelistic media system still has chilling effects on critical reporting. In DMI terms, this suggests a medium risk rating on press‑freedom and harassment: institutional and financial levers used in ways that disadvantage critical outlets, without the same level of personalised online attacks and delegitimising rhetoric seen from the radical right.