Seidler government crisis

On Sunday 23 June 1918 the Austrian Prime Minister, Ernst Seidler, told the Council of Ministers that he could not build a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and that the cabinet’s resignation was unavoidable. That same day, probably orally, he submitted it to Emperor Charles I, who accepted the request with a reservation. This is how the course of the day is reconstructed by the edition of the minutes of the Austrian Council of Ministers published by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. A British chronicle of the war records under 21 June that Seidler resigned. In fact his government survived another month, and its fate was decided largely by the Polish deputies.

The Poles go into opposition

Since February Seidler’s government had had no majority in the Chamber of Deputies. The Polish Club (PL), for decades the mainstay of every cabinet, had broken with it after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine, which gave the Ukrainians the Chełm Land. Already then, on 7 February, Seidler had offered his resignation for the first time, and the Emperor had not accepted it. Deprived of the Poles, the Prime Minister relied on the German parties and changed course on the nationalities question. In May the government decided to divide Bohemia into districts with separate authorities, as the Bohemian Germans had long demanded, and from 4 May the Imperial Council was adjourned indefinitely so that the government would not have to listen to criticism.

The turning point came in Kraków. On 10 June, after two days of deliberations, the parliamentary committee of the Polish Club adopted resolutions that authorised its presidium to negotiate with other clubs on the indivisibility of Galicia, declared war on the present government and demanded that parliament be convened soon. The Poles were especially outraged by the secret annex to the treaty with Ukraine, which provided for the separation from Galicia of a distinct crown land for the Ukrainians, and of which the Poles had learned. The government accused the Poles of turning towards the Czechs and the South Slavs and thereby wrecking their own dream of the Austro-Polish solution, that is, the union of the Kingdom of Poland with the monarchy. At the Council of Ministers on 12 June Seidler called the Kraków resolutions incomprehensible, but admitted that if parliament did not meet or achieved nothing, the government would have to go. The Minister for Galicia, Juliusz Twardowski (PL), assured his colleagues that no one regretted the Kraków resolutions more than he did, and advised waiting for the Club’s final position.

Meanwhile the crisis deepened. On 11 June the Emperor accepted the resignation of the Minister of the Interior, Count Friedrich Toggenburg. No reasons were officially given, but the press attributed it to his reluctance to govern without parliament. Seidler was indeed considering ruling without the Chamber under the notorious Article 14 of the constitution, which allowed decrees with the force of law to be issued. The former minister Joseph Maria Baernreither noted on 16 June that the Prime Minister was “playing the strong man” and talking of machine guns in case of unrest. There was cause for it. On 17 June the bread ration in Vienna was cut by half without warning, which provoked protests and strikes.

The Sunday Council of Ministers

On 23 June Seidler stated that the Poles’ final resolutions ruled out building a majority. At the same time he warned that if the Emperor ordered the cabinet to stay, governing without parliament in the present political and food situation would be very dangerous and would require deeper intervention than merely applying Article 14. The ministers agreed that resignation was necessary, but were not unanimous about what should come next. The Minister of Agriculture, Count Ernst Silva-Tarouca, a confidant of Charles, called it a constitutional imperative and allowed for a short session of parliament under a new government. The Minister of Commerce, the economist Friedrich von Wieser, declared bluntly that he would not take responsibility for a regime based on Article 14 and that until the war was decided a breach of the constitution had to be avoided. The Minister of Railways warned of a worsening food supply and unrest among the workers, and the Minister of Public Works spoke of strikes aimed at forcing parliament to be convened. Finally the Council discussed a draft imperial letter in case Charles wished first to try a new government.

What came next

The next day the liberal weekly Der Morgen described the secret deliberations in detail. On 24 and 25 June the Emperor received party leaders, among them the chairman of the Polish Club and mayor of Tarnów, Tadeusz Tertil (PL), and on the evening of 24 June he summoned the cabinet to the castle at Eckartsau. According to the introduction to the edition of the minutes, he rejected the resignation there and instructed Seidler to keep looking for a majority, and the chancellery recorded this on 28 June. On 27 June the ministers made a solemn declaration of loyalty to the Prime Minister, read out by the eldest of them, the Minister of Education, Ludwik Ćwikliński.

In this way the Emperor bought only a few weeks. The Imperial Council met again on 16 July, and on 22 July the Polish Club made its consent to a provisional budget conditional on the Prime Minister’s departure. That same day Seidler resigned again, this time with acceptance, and on 25 July the Emperor approved the resignation of the whole cabinet. He was succeeded by the former Minister of Education, Max Hussarek. The Poles, who for half a century had been the government’s most loyal allies in Vienna, had helped bring down a second prime minister in little more than a year.