Veit Dengler on the Neos: Between Co-Founding and Expulsion

Trigger: A Recording in the Parliamentary Group

According to the party, the trigger for the break was Dengler's recording of a parliamentary group meeting. The Carinthian Neos member of parliament Janos Juvan noticed this and reported it; Dengler subsequently deleted the recording. Shortly afterwards, on a Monday morning, Dengler received a five-page document from the National Council service titled "Leitfaden für Abgeordnete ohne Klubzugehörigkeit". Within 72 hours, he was expelled from both the parliamentary group and the party. He thereby also lost his seats on the specialist committees and the ability to submit individual inquiries to the federal government.

In the podcast, Dengler harshly criticized parliamentary group leader Meinl-Reisinger. Her leadership style was "autoritär", and the party had become "anderen Parteien ähnlicher geworden". There was a group of younger members of parliament who had no political experience, as well as a second group of experienced heads who, however, had partly not supported the developments of recent years. "Manche haben nur Beate erlebt", Dengler said verbatim in the KURIER podcast.

Allegations Against the Parliamentary Group Leadership

Meinl-Reisinger has been a member of the Neos since its founding and is today a central figure of the party. She took on the office of Foreign Minister; former parliamentary group leader Nikolaus Scherak had declined to succeed to the parliamentary group chairmanship after Strolz's withdrawal – officially because the office does not permit secondary employment.

Dengler also described substantive differences with the current party leadership. He criticized in particular the Neos' position on mandatory Covid-19 vaccination. On January 20, 2022, the National Council had passed the vaccination mandate; the Neos voted in favor together with the then Green Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein. Four Neos members of parliament voted against it; the then pandemic spokesman Gerald Loacker also did not toe the party line and later said in a STANDARD interview that the "Impflicht-Geschichte der liberalen Erzählung (...) geschadet" habe.

The Neos' line on the surveillance of encrypted chats (messenger surveillance) also caused dissatisfaction. On October 10, 2025, Neos member of parliament Stephanie Krisper had announced her resignation in a self-recorded video in front of the parliament building, citing among other things messenger surveillance and the stop to family reunifications. Scherak himself voted against the surveillance of encrypted messages, publicly turned against Sepp Schellhorn, and left the chamber during the vote on new social media rules for government members.

Internal Conflicts Over Vaccination Mandate and Surveillance

In the podcast, Dengler also took stock of the state of the party. He missed its former dynamism; today it risked falling into self-trivialization. "Jetzt hat Neos sich etabliert, neigt manchmal aber auch zur Selbstverzwergung: 'Wir sind halt eine liberale Partei und damit kriegen wir nie mehr als zehn Prozent.' So ändert man das Land nicht", said Dengler.

He also complained about what he saw as the pronounced "Stammesdrang" of Austrian politics – formulated on the occasion of his departure as the Neos' foreign policy spokesman after he had called for Austria's NATO accession in November 2025. "Was mich an der österreichischen Politik irritiert, ist dieser unglaubliche Stammesdrang: Mein Stamm sagt das, alle in diesem Stamm müssen dasselbe sagen, dann tauschen wir Glasperlen aus und dann wird's gut werden", said Dengler.

In the conversation, the trained economist and former McKinsey, Dell, and NZZ manager also addressed the party's structural debate. Whereas in Switzerland around 80 percent of National Council members are militia politicians who pursue a profession alongside parliament, the younger Neos members of parliament tended to be career politicians: "Unsere jungen Abgeordneten sind tendenziell Berufspolitiker, die etwas älteren sind meist parallel beruflich aktiv."

Party Funding and Structural Debate

Finally, Dengler spoke about the level of party funding. This amounted to at least 340 million euros per year in Austria, according to Dengler; per mandate, that worked out to roughly one million euros annually for established parties and two million for new ones. He had advocated halving it. In the 2024/25 National Council election campaign, no party had spent less than five million euros. At the same time, the ÖVP and Greens had together lost 17 percent – "dann haben wir die Wahl nicht gewonnen, sondern eine große Gelegenheit versäumt".

Dengler's personal background shapes his view of politics. At 16, he had started working at McKinsey, no: at McDonald's, to finance his studies, he said in the podcast. In 2013, he left Austria for Switzerland. With the project "Phönix" – the code name of the Neos founding – an invitation email without a concrete political direction was sent out in 2011, which became the birth hour of the party. After the state election in Salzburg, Strolz announced his resignation as party chairman on May 7, 2018 at the Presseclub Concordia; the "Startup-Phase" of the Neos had been "erfolgreich abgeschlossen", said Strolz. The Salzburg state group, however, lost its seats in the state parliament around five years later. Today, according to the party, the Neos maintain three regional groups in Carinthia and five in Salzburg. Most recently, 94 percent of Neos members had voted in favor of entering the coalition with the ÖVP and SPÖ.