Seidler becomes Austrian prime minister

On 23 June 1917 Emperor Charles I appointed a new prime minister of the Austrian half of the monarchy. The choice fell on Ernst Seidler, Ritter von Feuchtenegg, a senior civil servant and professor of administrative law, who had been minister of agriculture for three weeks. The day before, 22 June, the emperor had accepted the resignation of Count Heinrich Clam-Martinic and instructed him to conduct state business until a new government was formed. This is the account given by the edition of the protocols of the Austrian Council of Ministers prepared by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. A British chronicle of the war gives 18 June as the date of the resignation. According to the historian Damian Szymczak, the outgoing prime minister had tried in vain to reconstruct his cabinet. Austria now had its fourth government since the start of the war, and Clam-Martinic had governed for barely six months.

The parliament that brought down the government

Clam-Martinic was undone by his most important undertaking. On 30 May 1917, after a three-year break, the Austrian Imperial Council met again. The prime minister had counted on the opening of parliament and the easing of censorship to draw the nations of the monarchy into co-operation with the government. The opposite happened. At the very first sitting of the House of Deputies the representatives of the nations came forward with declarations that challenged the existing constitutional order. The Czech Union demanded the transformation of the monarchy into a federal state of free and equal national states and the union of all branches of the “Czechoslovak” nation, thus including the Slovaks of Hungary, in a single democratic state. The South Slav deputies, on whose behalf Father Anton Korošec spoke, proclaimed the May Declaration: they called for the union of all lands of the monarchy inhabited by Slovenes, Croats and Serbs into an autonomous state body under the Habsburg sceptre. Both declarations also concerned Hungarian lands, so the parliament in Vienna could not even consider them.

The government had no majority in the House. The Czechs remained in opposition, and this time the Poles were missing too. The Polish Club (PL), since the 1870s a dependable pillar of every government, came out in May in favour of an independent and united Poland and ceased to support the cabinet. On 1 June the minister for Galicia, Michał Bobrzyński, left the government, and no successor was found for him. The Social Democrats had no intention of rescuing the government, and the German National Union on its own was not enough. The German parties in any case resented the prime minister for not having carried out by decree the promised division of Bohemia into national districts, which had been abandoned in April under pressure from the foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin. The editors of the protocols conclude that Clam-Martinic was unwelcome to all the nationalists he was supposed to win over. After the opening of parliament his government survived less than a month, and in that time the House of Deputies managed to meet only nine times.

A government of officials

Seidler was born in 1862 in Schwechat, near Vienna. He studied law in Vienna under the economist Carl Menger, worked in the financial administration and in the chamber of commerce in Leoben, and from 1900 in the ministry of agriculture, where he dealt with commercial treaties. From 1906 he lectured in law and administrative science at the University of Agriculture in Vienna, in 1909 he became a head of section in the ministry, and in 1916 he was ennobled. On 1 June 1917 he took over the management of the ministry of agriculture from Clam-Martinic, which according to the editors of the protocols was already a preparation for the change of prime minister. He belonged to no party and had no political experience. His choice is described as a compromise solution.

The change of government meant an almost complete change of personnel. Of Clam-Martinic’s cabinet, practically only the minister of education, Max Hussarek, remained. The new government consisted of officials and an unusually large number of university professors. At first only three received full ministerial appointments: the minister of the interior, Count Friedrich Toggenburg, hitherto governor of the Tyrol; the head of the food office, Anton Höfer; and Juliusz Twardowski (PL), a Viennese official of Polish origin, who as minister without portfolio took over Galician affairs. The other members of the cabinet merely managed their departments. This underlined the provisional character of the government, whose main tasks were to secure food and coal for the country and to steer the budget through parliament. In his first appearance in the House, on 26 June, Seidler announced that he would govern “in a spirit of the strictest impartiality” and that, once parliamentary negotiations had produced a result, he would make way for a permanent government.

What came next

The provisional cabinet proved more durable than its predecessor. At the beginning of July the emperor proclaimed an amnesty for political prisoners, which benefited chiefly Czechs, Italians and South Slavs, including the Czech politician Karel Kramář, who had been sentenced to death for high treason. The German parties received it with indignation, and the nations it was meant to relieve did not change course. Seidler, lacking a base of his own, became increasingly dependent on the German parties and on Czernin. Contemporaries did not spare him: the Viennese lawyer and politician Josef Redlich called him in his diary “Czernin’s parliamentary postman”, and the satirist Karl Kraus made him a target of mockery. Even so, Seidler stayed in power for more than a year. He fell in July 1918, when, after the Chełm Land was given to Ukraine in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he finally lost the support of the Polish Club.