His father Erich, a railway worker and union leader, was mayor of Hinterbrühl, a suburb of Vienna, and represented the Mödling district in the National Council in the Austrian Parliament.

From January 1995 to October 1996, Spindelegger was Member of the European Parliament,[5] where he served on the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy.

[7] Former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves has accused Spindelegger of personally intervening in the case with the Austrian border police in order to please the Russian government.

[8] As foreign minister, Spindelegger worked closely with international organisations in the field of migration and contributed to the policy debate during the Third EU-Africa Summit in Tripoli.

After he was appointed as Vice-Chancellor, he created a "State Secretariat for Integration" within the Austrian Federal Ministry of Interior and nominated Sebastian Kurz for the position.

At this time, he worked closely with the Ministry of Interior on asylum and labour migration issues while also negotiating a re-admission agreement with the Afghan Government.

[10] By 2013, the pace of withdrawing Austrian peacekeeping troops after 39 years of monitoring duty on the Golan Heights (as part of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force) exposed splits between the Social Democrat-led defense ministry and the conservative-led foreign ministry ahead of the national elections that year.

[13] In July 2014, Spindelegger announced that his fellow conservative Johannes Hahn would remain Austria's Member of the European Commission under President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The Social Democrats and some within his party called for a new tax on wealth which he opposed saying that the focus should be on cutting national debt levels that were scheduled to reach 80% of GDP by the end of the year.

[19] This organisation was caught in a scandal where journalists found out that one of the ways the it helps to shape EU migration policy is through its support of the coast guards in Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia - all entities accused of human rights violations and presumably responsible for thousands of illegal pullbacks in the Mediterranean.