Austrian Populists Score Big Victories
Austrian politics is set to tip to the right less than a year after averting a far-right presidency by the populist Freedom party, with the party on course to emerge as coalition kingmaker in Sunday’s national elections.
Though currently fighting for second place behind 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz of the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), the Freedom party has managed to dictate the agenda of a campaign centred largely around immigration and fears of radical Islam, and will receive a last-stretch boost from a “dirty campaigning” row between the traditional centre parties.
Neither Kurz nor incumbent chancellor Christian Kern of the centre-left SPÖ have ruled out entering a coalition with the Freedom party, whose current leader Heinz-Christian Strache could become the first European politician with a neo-Nazi background to sit in government since the second world war.
If it enters government, the Freedom party wants to deny migrants access to welfare payments, introduce Swiss-style referendums and push for Austria to join the Visegrád group of central European states whose borders overlap with the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian empire.
FPÖ politician Norbert Hofer, who was beaten in the race for the Austrian presidency by Green-backed Alexander van der Bellen in December 2016, will be pushed by the party as a candidate for the foreign ministry.
Founded by a former Nazi functionary and SS member after the end of the second world war, the Freedom party became the first rightwing populist party to form part of a government in postwar Europe when its late leader Jörg Haider entered a coalition with the conservative ÖVP in 2000 – a that which was at the time met with outrage and economic sanctions from Israel and several EU member states.
A split in 2005 and Haider’s death in a car crash three years later appeared to have signalled the end of the anti-immigration party, yet 12 years later FPÖ officials are not only confident of surpassing their best results of the Haider years but have managed to turn Austria into what political scientists call a “net exporter of rightwing populism”, pioneering strategies later adopted by far-right parties elsewhere in Europe.
Under the leadership of Strache, who was arrested by German police as a 20-year-old for taking part in a march organised by a banned neo-Nazi movement modelled on the Hitler Youth, the FPÖ has professionalised its methods and switched its campaign from broad anti-foreigner sentiment to a more focused anti-Islam rhetoric as early as 2006.
For this year’s national elections, the party produced not conventional campaign ads but a short sitcom series called “The Hubers”, which voices fears about welfare tourism and overcrowding to the sound of laughter without ever explicitly mentioning immigration.
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