The current goverment is very unpopular, but the SPÖ in the opposition has failed to capitalize on that and is currently polling below the governing ÖVP [2]. This incident will not help.
[1] https://twitter.com/MartinThuer/status/1664992876231639042
That's because the SPÖ has made the same mistake that the German SPD or French and Italian PS did: they went away from their worker roots and aligned themselves with corporatist ideals (i.e. neoliberalism). No surprise that their electorate eroded together with the wealth and life quality of said electorate thanks to wage stagnation.
Babler is an actual social democrat in name and politics. I am pretty sure he will manage to turn around the party's fate - and hopefully, also be an example towards our social democrats, I'm sick of Olaf Scholz and his cuddling with the FDP.
This is why a political system that lets parties be born and die naturally is preferable to the US two-party system. We're stuck with a choice between two vampires.
This is expressed well. To be complete, we could say,
Political parties in a country are subverted at all levels by robust economic interests, and subverted at the federal level by robust regional economic interests, which in turn subverts the national interest.
Now, never credit maliciousness to what can be credited to incompetence, but you know, it's a lot of small details that make the whole story more bizarre.