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UPDATE: Vienna and Lower Austria’s hard lockdown extended until May 2nd

The strict lockdown in the Austrian capital of Vienna and the state of Lower Austria will be extended until at least May 2nd.

Published: 12 April 2021 17:37 CEST
Updated: 13 April 2021 09:18 CEST

UPDATE: Vienna and Lower Austria's hard lockdown extended until May 2nd

A visitors walks past removed chairs at the 'Orient Accident' restaurant at Naschmarkt market in Vienna, Austria.(Photo by JOE KLAMAR / AFP)

The decision was announced at a press conference on Monday, April 12th, due largely to the dire situation in the country’s intensive care wards.

Unlike the other eastern states, Burgenland will not extend its lockdown beyond April 18th.

Vienna Mayor Michael Ludwig announced on Monday that the existing strict measures would remain in place for a further two weeks past the current April 18th expiration date.

Austria’s coronavirus lockdown: Under what circumstances can I leave my apartment?

This includes the 24-hour stay-at-home order, a ban on close contact services (i.e. hairdressers and cosmetic services), strict border controls, working from home requirements and the closure of non-essential shops.

FFP2 masks will now be required in all rooms where more than one person is present, other than in private homes.

Schools will continue ‘distance learning’ – i.e. home schooling – until at least April 25th.

The next meeting of state authorities is scheduled for Friday, April 16th, although this may be brought forward, Austria’s Kronen Zeitung newspaper reports.

This is the third time the lockdown – which was originally put in place only to cover the Easter period – has been extended. It was initially imposed until April 7th, before being extended until April 11th, then April 18th.

Member comments

Anonymous - 13 April 2021 at 19:11 CEST

Of course…let’s lock down again AND have our health minister resign. No lockdown will solve this. Unless there is a mass vaccination effort, which there is not (that little website thing is a hot mess…) we will continue to be in lockdown until Christmas! Figure it out! This place has a socialized medical system and you’re telling me you can’t get this done? And they can in Mississippi? Vienna is doomed…

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Vienna Festival director Milo Rau hits back at anti-Semitism accusations

As the conflict in Gaza sharply polarises opinion, “we must be inflexible” in defending the free exchange of ideas and opinions, the acclaimed Swiss director told AFP in an interview this week.

“I’m not going to take a step aside… If we let the antagonism of the war and of our society seep into our cultural and academic institutions, we will have completely lost,” said the 47-year-old, who will inaugurate the Wiener Festwochen, a festival of theatre, concerts, opera, film and lectures that runs until June 23rd in the Austrian capital and that has taken on a more political turn under his tenure.

The Swiss director has made his name as a provocateur, whether travelling to Moscow to stage a re-enactment of the trial of Russian protest punk band Pussy Riot, using children to play out the story of notorious Belgian paedophile Marc Dutroux, or trying to recruit Islamic State jihadists as actors.

Completely ridiculous

The Vienna Festival has angered Austria’s conservative-led government — which is close to Israel — by inviting Greek former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and French Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux, both considered too critical of Israel.

A speech ahead of the festival on Judenplatz (Jews’ Square) by Israeli-German philosopher Omri Boehm — who has called for replacing Israel with a bi-national state for Arabs and Jews — also made noise.

“Who will be left to invite? Every day, there are around ten articles accusing us of being anti-Semitic, saying that our flag looks like the Palestinian flag, completely ridiculous things,” Rau said, as he worked from a giant bed which has been especially designed by art students and installed at the festival office.

Hamas’ bloody October 7th assault on southern Israel and the devastating Israeli response have stoked existing rancour over the Middle East conflict between two diametrically opposed camps in Europe.

In this climate, “listening to the other side is already treachery,” lamented the artistic director.

“Wars begin in this impossibility of listening, and I find it sad that we Europeans are repeating war at our level,” he said.

As head of also the NTGent theatre in the Belgian city of Ghent, he adds his time currently “is divided between a pro-Palestinian country and a pro-Israeli country,” or between “colonial guilt” in Belgium and “genocide guilt” in Austria, Adolf Hitler’s birthplace.

Institutional revolution

The “Free Republic of Vienna” will be proclaimed on Friday as this year’s Vienna Festival celebrates. according to Rau, “a second modernism, democratic, open to the world” in the city of the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and artist and symbolist master Gustav Klimt.

Some 50,000 people are expected to attend the opening ceremony on the square in front of Vienna’s majestic neo-Gothic town hall.

With Rau describing it as an “institutional revolution” and unlike any other festival in Europe, the republic has its own anthem, its own flag and a council made up of Viennese citizens, as well as honorary members, including Varoufakis and Ernaux, who will participate virtually in the debates.

The republic will also have show trials — with real lawyers, judges and politicians participating — on three weekends.

Though there won’t be any verdicts, Rau himself will be in the dock to embody “the elitist art system”, followed by the republic of Austria and finally by the anti-immigrant far-right Freedom Party (FPOe), which leads polls in the Alpine EU member ahead of September national elections.

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