Austrian Executive Returns Home To Personally Inspect Every Voter Before Election

Gerhard Zeiler, the departing Warner Bros. Discovery international chief, has begun a personal political campaign in his native Austria that will require him to shake the hand of every eligible voter in the country before the autumn elections. The former executive, who announced his exit from Skydance this week, has purchased a used postal van and a road map of Austria's 2,093 municipalities, and intends to visit each one on foot.

«I have spent my career asking too much of my teams,» Zeiler said in a statement. «Now I will ask the same of myself. Every voter will receive a firm handshake and a look in the eye. No exceptions.» His campaign office, a converted alpine hut in Salzburg, has printed a schedule that allocates four minutes per handshake, ten hours per day, and no weekends off until the last ballot is cast.

The Austrian interior ministry has been forced to issue a new voter registration format that includes a checkbox for «handshake completed,» and municipal mayors have begun erecting wooden handshake booths in town squares. In Vienna, the city council has repainted 1,200 crosswalks to read «Zeiler was here» in anticipation of his arrival. The former executive has also hired a physiotherapist who will travel with him to keep his right arm operational through the estimated 1.4 million handshakes remaining.

«Sometimes we simply asked too much,» Zeiler told his former staff. «Now I am asking the voters for everything.»

2Views