By Eva Ciabattoni

Political slogans like “Simply the better” show the milder side of Austrian politics. The country’s Oct. 1 election brought a far higher turnout, 74 percent, than is usual in American elections.

I finally got an Internet connection to our new place, the top floor of a villa built in 1880 in the village of Wöllersdorf. We are asked two questions about our new home: Do you have a kitchen? and Is that in the Piesting Valley?

It is common practice in Austria for renters to do major kitchen remodels, then dismantle and reinstall them when they move. Rents tend to be long-term, and laws protect renters to ensure a stable quality of life. So, when you buy a house that happens to have renters in it, the renters come with the house and can stay there until the term of the rental contract is up, often 5 to 10 years or even longer. And yes, we are lucky to have a kitchen, as well as 12-foot-high ceilings, wide-plank pine floors, an old tile wood-burning stove, four balconies and 18-inch-thick walls. Our enormous windows look out over woods in back, a gingko tree to the south and the Piesting Valley to the west.

Names of roads and locations tend to be descriptive in a functional way. Austria is a country rich in water resources, and local water sources were and are important to the millers, vintners, farmers and villagers. Thus, the river that supplies a locale is included in the basic information about it. This year we live in the Piesting River Valley. Last year we lived in the Schwechat River Valley, and the kids continue to go to school in the Triesting River Valley.

Road names are also meant to be practical. I once asked a cousin the name of a major road. “What direction are you going?” he asked. I told him I didn’t need directions, just the name of the road. “If you are going toward Baden, it’s called Badener Straße,” my cousin explained. “Once you are past Baden and headed toward Vienna (Wien), it’s called Wiener Straße. If you are between Baden and Bad Vöslau, heading toward Bad Vöslau, it’s called Vöslauer Straße. Once past Bad Vöslau, it’s called Wiener Neustädter Straße.”

Road names are like Austrian politics - they resemble a complex board game that all the locals seem to understand perfectly.

There was a national election Oct. 1. Instead of donkeys and elephants squaring off, the greens, blues, reds, whites, oranges and browns were duking it out. The first thing you notice scanning the billboards from your car window is the mild sloganeering compared to the Karl Rovian take-no-prisoners approach to campaigning in the United States. The chancellor ran for re-election under the rubric, “Simply the better” (candidate). Not “Simply the best”; that would be considered braggy. No. “Simply the better.” The Green Party, in addition to being for women and against nuclear power, scandals and abuses of power, ran with the underwhelming message “Green. You won’t regret it.”

I was in danger of falling asleep behind the wheel from boredom,except for the slogans the FPÖ Free Party used to try to whip the electorate into a frot “Daham statt Islam” (”Home, not Islam” - it rhymes in the German slang) and “Deutsch statt nix versteh’n” (the German-only counterpart of the English-language-only movement in the United States). Xenophobia plays to a limited audience - the party picked up around 10 percent of the vote.

An astonishing (to an American) 74 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, compared with 84 percent four years ago. What’s interesting is that people vote for a party, not a candidate. The ballot is a large white page with the names of the parties across the top and lists of names under each party. The names on the ballot don’t match the names of the people campaigning, however. Whenever I asked about the apparent discrepancy, people stared at me as though I had failed to grasp the completely obvious and transparent - as transparent and obvious as the street-naming conventions.

“Those are the names of the people in Parliament,” they explained. “They pick the people in the government.” Me: “So you pick a party, not a person?” They (patiently): “You can vote for one person, but only in the party you voted for.” Me: “So if that person gets a lot of votes …” They (patiently): “They move up.” Me: “They move up.” They (satisfied that I finally get it): “Yes, they move up.” Me: “What does that mean, they move up?” They (stunned): “They move up the list, so they have a better chance of getting a seat, depending on the number of seats the party wins.” Me (starting to see the light): “So the seats for each party are allocated according to the percentage of the vote.” They (beaming now as the slow pupil shows a bit of promise): “Yes!”

The vote tally won’t be finalized until all the absentee ballots are counted, but it looks like no party gained a majority. The reds (SPÖ) and blacks (ÖVP) are neck and neck, with the greens and the FPÖ vying for third and fourth, and the BZÖ (the party spun off from the FPÖ by Jörg Haider) and the KPÖ (the K is for communist) as stragglers. The rules of the game now demand that two of the parties form a coalition that gives them more than 50 percent or the president decides.

With my Internet window to the world up and running since Sept. 13, I turned my attention back to news from home. What a guilty relief it was to realize that Sept. 11 had slipped by like any ordinary Monday.

Eva Ciabattoni is a Los Altos resident and freelance writer living abroad with her family in Austria.