Current Austrian Cancellor Wolfgang Schüssel and Dear Leader Bush
Wolfgang Schüssel is the head of the Christian Democratic party in Austria, the People's Party (ÖVP). His party came in second to the Social Democrats in last Sunday's election. So we can call him the outgoing Chancellor.
My wife Gerti took this photo below of Schüssel in Graz, Austria, at the official kickoff rally for his party's election campaign. Since Austria is a normal democracy and not a national security state, we didn't need a ticket from a party source to attend the rally. And she could stand near the front of the crowd and get a good snapshot.
They had a video before Schüssel spoke. It included shots of him at official appearances with fellow EU conservatives Angela Merkel of Germany and Jacques Chirac of France. They didn't show the above picture, which was taken at the US-EU summit that Austria hosted this year.
The video did include what looked like a picture of Bush from the summit. It showed Schüssel standing between two shadowy figures at podiums at that summit. The two could have been Bush and Tony Blair. But they only left that picture up for a couple of seconds, so you couldn't really tell.
Like hometown boy Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is from Graz, it seems that Schüssel saw no particular electoral benefit from having his picture displayed standing next to Bush the Liberator of Peoples and Scourge of The Terrorists.
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