Georg Ritter von Schönerer (17 July 1842 – 14 August 1921) was an Austrian landowner and politician of Austria-Hungary active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He then conducted the business affairs of his father's estate at Rosenau near Zwettl in the rural Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, where he became known as a generous patriarch of the local peasants and great benefactor.

[3] During the Panic of 1873, Schönerer was elected to Cisleithanian Austria’s Imperial Council as a liberal representative, but became a more and more extreme and vocal German nationalist as his career progressed.

He broke with his party three years later, agitating against "Jewish" capitalism, against the Catholic Imperial House of Habsburg, and against the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, which he condemned as a betrayal of ethnic German interests.

"[4] Tensions rose even further in 1879 due to the accession of minister-president Eduard Taaffe, a member of the Austrian nobility of Irish descent and whose Catholic, monarchist, and pro-minority policies so enraged Schönerer and his followers that they accused Taafe of being "anti-German."

The anti-Slavic inclinations of the framers, however, are well represented in the following excerpt from their manifesto: "We protest against all attempts to convert Austria into a Slavic state.

We shall continue to agitate for the maintenance of German as the official language and to oppose the extension of federalism ... [W]e are steadfast supporters of the alliance with Germany and the foreign policy now being followed by the empire.

He fiercely denounced the influence of "exploitative international Jews" and in 1885 had an Aryan paragraph added to the Linz program, which led to the ultimate breach between him and Adler and Friedjung.

"[10] In 1888, Schönerer was temporarily imprisoned for ransacking a Jewish-owned newspaper office and assaulting its employees for prematurely reporting the imminent death of the German emperor Wilhelm I.

Schönerer was not reelected to the Imperial Council until 1897, while rivals like the Vienna mayor Karl Lueger and his Christian Social Party took the chance created by his disfavor to get ahead.

Schönerer staged mass protests against the ordinance and disrupted parliamentary proceedings, actions that eventually led Emperor Franz Joseph to dismiss Badeni.