In order to break the fourth corona wave, which has now become a pandemic for the unvaccinated, Austria's new Chancellor threatens them with the whip.
Alexander Schallenberg has announced a lockdown with house arrest only for those who don't like vaccinations instead of the carrot that has been offered in abundance up to now.
It would be a unique step in the bundle of the most diverse corona measures, not only in Europe, to break the wave and not to let the health system collapse like in Romania.
But it is also a unique admission of the helplessness with which Sebastian Kurz's successor wants to increase the stagnating vaccination rate in his small country. With tangible, even professionally painful disadvantages for non-vaccinated people and practical advantages for vaccinated people, other European countries such as France and Italy have been able to significantly reduce the number of those who refuse to vaccinate and procrastinators - even without exit restrictions for this group of people.
It was accepted that there, as in Germany, a vocal and sometimes militant minority would mobilize against any state pressure on anti-vaccination opponents and skeptics.
In Austria, it is the right-wing populist FPÖ with the avowed anti-vaccination opponent Kickl at the helm, which raises the mood against the corona policy of the ÖVP and the Greens, which is denounced as totalitarian.
A lockdown for the unvaccinated, which is hardly controllable anyway, would be grist to their mill.