text: what is a great defining moment in austria history from 1955-1999?   the soviet army left!  then austria was able to become a neutral country, but also democratic, free and with a capitalist system (with a strong welfare state).  the soviet union was a catastrophe for austria.  they killed thousands (including my grandfather's younger brother, who was shot in the head in front of his parents on his 16th birthday), raped thousands of women, burned and destroyed many building and shipped scientists, experts and even factories down to the bricks to the ussr.  political expression was restricted and people were mostly poor.  the signing of the state treaty that declared austria’s neutrality (and the withdrawal of the ussr forces) was an event without which austria could never have become what it is today.  this is also the period of shared power between the austrian people's party (ovp) and the social democratic party (sdp).  they ruled in a coalition almost the entire time (the exception was when one controlled the executive alone, but only for a few years).  they used to be enemies and even fought a low-level civil war in the 1920s, but the nazis treated them both equally terribly, so party leaders realized that the other party wasn't nearly as bad as they thought, and that things could get a lot worse, and were able to cooperate a bit better once they had a chance to regain power.  this power share ended in 1999 when the freedom party of austria (fpo) won 27% of the vote, which put them in second place after the sdp.  this obligated the sdp to form a coalition with the fpo and the chain of continuous power sharing between the ovp and spo was ended.  the next elections yielded an ovp-fpo coalition, although since then the fpo has lost a lot of popularity and did poorly in regional local elections getting a fraction over 10% of the vote), followed by a defection of many fpo leaders to form a new party, the alliance for the future of austria (bzo), so it is likely that the sdp and ovp coalition could be back on during the next national elections.   people made a big fuss over the fpo making it into the coalition, but i always thought that they were a bit stupid, as the fpo had won 22% of the vote during the previous parliamentary elections, which was not enough to get them in the coalition but still pretty close, so the fact that they managed to pick up five more points wasn’t exactly the political shock many outside of austria liked to pretend it was. i really don’t like the fpo and i’ll be glad to see them go, but they aren’t nazis.  they are just a very conservative european party, and the other countries lead by other european parties threatened by similar parties in their own countries took the opportunity to denounce the fpo in an effort to similarly denounce their own rivals.