Josef Höppinger is an increasingly rare type among European voters. He never changes. “I’m a worker. I vote socialist. Always,” said the retired plumber, 81. But he thinks the governing Social Democrats of Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, will suffer badly when Europe goes to the ballot box this week.

“You’ve got all these scandals with the banks, all the sleaze and corruption. The big parties will get weaker, not stronger.”

Höppinger has lived all his life in the centre of “Red Vienna”, a city for ever run by Social Democrats. His home is in Karl Marx-Hof, the expressionist workers’ fortress that was Europe’s pioneering experiment in social housing in the 1920s and then a battleground in the civil war of 1934, when the left lost to the pre-Hitler Austro-fascists.

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