The Patriotic Front

In March 1933 Dollfuss gave a speech in Innsbruck in the course of a local election campaign in which he said: ‘Thus I believe that today and for the next while we are in a decisive period… when party differences no longer have a place. I call upon our Christian and German people in the alpine provinces, old and young, to form an Austrian Patriotic Front.’ ¹ For the first time the phrase ‘Patriotic Front’ was introduced to the Austrian public, although it was still a vague and nebulous concept, an expression for the desire for political and national unity rather than a concrete programme. Dollfuss appealed to the ‘revolutionary idea of patriotism’ and called for unconditional support for the task that lay ahead to form an effective government in the place of the parliamentary régime that had ceased to exist when parliament had been closed on 4 March 1933.