Fink was born in Andelsbuch, in the Bregenz Forest region, the son of a farmer's family. He and his younger brother Alois were the only surviving children; his father died when Fink was four years old, whereafter his mother remarried. The bright pupil went on to attend the Gymnasiumsecondary school in Brixen but soon had to abandon his education to work on his family's farmstead. Fink began his political career in 1879, when he was elected a member of the municipal assembly in Andelsbuch and served as mayor from 1888 to 1897. Actually a moderate Conservative, he joined the Landtag assembly of Vorarlberg in 1890 and the newly established Christian Social Party in 1893. He was elected MP of the Austrian Imperial Council parliament in 1897 where he did not join the faction of his antiliberal and antisemiticChristian Social party fellows until 1901. His career as a CS party executive was further promoted, when the long-time leader Karl Lueger died in 1910. During the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, Fink was elected one of the three presidents of the German-Austrian provisional national assembly on 21 October 1918. He made his mark as a strong opponent of a unification with the German Weimar Republic, though against the majority of the assembly, and also spoke against tendencies to attach his Allemannichome country Vorarlberg to Switzerland. Upon the Austrian Constitutional Assembly election, Fink on 15 March 1919 was able to forge a grand coalition government with the left-wing Social Democratic Workers' Party under State Chancellor Karl Renner and to assume the newly established office of an Austrian Vice-Chancellor. Fink played a vital role in Austrian internal politics during the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, becoming CS faction leader in the National Council parliament, which ratified the treaty on 17 October 1919. Accompanied by fierce protests, Chancellor Renner and his government resigned, though another cabinet of Social Democratic and Christian Social ministers under Renner and Fink was immediately formed and confirmed by the National Council. Fink was superseded by his party fellow Michael Mayr, when Renner's coalition government finally broke up on 7 July 1920. Upon the legislative election of 1920 on 17 October, Mayr formed a minority government backed by the right-wing Greater German People's Party and Fink during the subsequent period of political radicalisation no longer held any government offices, but remained considered an éminence grise and power broker.
