Austria’s Social Democrats have announced the decision to select the future leader of the party before summer, following several weeks of infighting.

This signals the start of a race between candidates for leadership positions.

An agreement was reached stating the 140,000 members within the party should be consulted as to the choice of the new leader, and an extraordinary party congress would then be held to confirm the winner. This should take place before summer, yet there is the possibility a new leader could be selected by May.

The situation within the party intensified earlier this week as socialist Hans-Peter Doskozil applied for the chair following years of wrangling with current party leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner, the first female leader of the SPÖ on a federal level since 2018, Euractiv reports.

Up until now, a colleague has never gone against an incumbent SPÖ chairperson.

The Social Democrats have been trailing the right-wing FPÖ in Austrian polls for several months, yet they were steadily in the lead for almost all of last year, at times surpassing 30%.

“This party still lives in the self-image of having to serve everyone. It gets lost in far too many issues. And it has lost its focus,” said Austrian policy advisor Rudolf Fussi, going on to add that concentrating on staffing issues was “a mistake that parties like to make.

“The SPÖ must sharpen its content and answer the question for whom it wants to make politics and then consistently deliver these answers in all policy areas,” he said.

For the SPÖ, the country’s largest opposition party, the focus is now on reuniting over a year before the regular new election date.

“I want us to set up a reasonable process, as far as you can still get something reasonable together in this situation,” according to the SPÖ’s Peter Kaiser, ORF reports.