The right-wing wave surging through Europe picked up size and speed on Sept. 29 as Austria’s hard-right Freedom Party won the country’s general election. Following on the heels of far-right victories in eastern Germany and the Netherlands earlier this year, Austria joins the likes of Italy, Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary as European Union members where extreme rightist parties have—armed with unabashedly illiberal, authoritarian agendas—rendered the political establishment impotent.
Openly calling for a Volkskanzler (people’s chancellor) to lead the country—just one piece of Nazi lingo that party head Herbert Kickl regularly employs—the Freedom Party took 29 percent of the vote, catapulting it over the ruling conservative Austrian People’s Party, which sank to 26.5 percent, and the Social Democrats to a meager 21 percent. The Freedom Party’s record result though is not enough to form a government on its own. Moreover, the centrist parties’ totals, when combined with the spoils of one of two smaller parties—one liberal, one green—would constitute the makings of a majority.
The right-wing wave surging through Europe picked up size and speed on Sept. 29 as Austria’s hard-right Freedom Party won the country’s general election. Following on the heels of far-right victories in eastern Germany and the Netherlands earlier this year, Austria joins the likes of Italy, Slovakia, Croatia, and Hungary as European Union members where extreme rightist parties have—armed with unabashedly illiberal, authoritarian agendas—rendered the political establishment impotent.
Openly calling for a Volkskanzler (people’s chancellor) to lead the country—just one piece of Nazi lingo that party head Herbert Kickl regularly employs—the Freedom Party took 29 percent of the vote, catapulting it over the ruling conservative Austrian People’s Party, which sank to 26.5 percent, and the Social Democrats to a meager 21 percent. The Freedom Party’s record result though is not enough to form a government on its own. Moreover, the centrist parties’ totals, when combined with the spoils of one of two smaller parties—one liberal, one green—would constitute the makings of a majority.
But the Freedom Party is now front and center in Austrian political life. On the campaign trail, Kickl promised to turn the country into “Fortress Austria” by stopping migration cold; “remigrating” (that is, expelling) Austrian citizens with foreign roots deemed unable to integrate; purging the education system; and neutralizing the public media. He rants against “gender madness” and “climate communism.”
The Freedom Party also owes a particular debt to the COVID-19 pandemic. During the crisis, the Freedom Party alone assumed the stance of critic and championed freedom of choice in response to pandemic-driven restrictions and requirements. The conspiracy theories that swirled around the crisis fed the Freedom Party’s own body of irrational accusations and baseless explanations. The government did itself no favors by imposing four nationwide lockdowns, stiff penalties for noncompliance, and nearly 40 weeks of school shutdown.
The Freedom Party buttressed its prominent place in the annals of Europe’s postwar extreme right. It initiated the far right’s modern normalization in Europe when it took a place in government under the People’s Party in 2000, breaking the country’s mostly rigid pattern of conservative-social democratic leadership that had marked the Cold War era and beyond. When the Freedom Party’s charismatic frontman Jörg Haider temporarily became vice chancellor in 2000, the event was so unprecedented—even scandalous—that EU members isolated the Vienna government and imposed political sanctions until he resigned from the party leadership Critics feared that tolerating an EU member with such questionable democratic credentials would legitimize it—and encourage imitators across the continent. (This happened even though Haider’s politics, when measured up against Kickl’s, were relatively moderate.)
And this is exactly what happened. In 2017, the Freedom Party returned to government—in control of control six ministries, including defense, the interior, and foreign affairs—this time with no fuss from Brussels. Yet the coalition lasted less than two years, falling out in disgrace when Freedom Party leader and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was caught on video in an Ibiza hotel room soliciting funds from a purported Russian national and expressing intentions to take over and censor Austria’s most widely read newspaper.
It is a sign of new times that the possibility of today’s yet-more-radical Freedom Party coming to power is now acceptable in European company. There are no major protests or calls for sanctions. Moreover, it trashes the hypothesis—heard in Germany regarding the AfD—that stints in government will discredit incompetent, conspiracy-preaching populists whose outrageous pledges can’t possibly turned into effective policy. If the sordid 2019 video footage didn’t kill off the Freedom Party, presumably nothing will.
The extent of the right-wing shift within Austria—and its implication across Europe—isn’t superficial, and the results cannot be written off as a “protest vote” or as a diffuse swipe at the system. Kickl is an extremist among extremists who appeals to Austrians’ worst instincts—and with this triumph, he contributes to a playbook that Europe’s extreme right has been drafting since the 1990s.
“Our studies in recent years,” said Andreas Kranebitter, the director of the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, a Vienna-based research institute, in an interview with Foreign Policy, “show that there is more racism and antisemitism in the population, and a higher number of people adverse to foreigners and hostile to immigration, than at any time in recent decades.”
The Freedom Party, Kranebitter said, has spurred and accompanied this trend, even reinserting into the party program Nazi terminology such as Volkskanzler and Volksgemeinschaft, the latter referring to a homogenous ethnic community. “These are code words that right-wing militants understand very well, and ever more new supporters are accepting of or indifferent to, too,” he said. “And this now includes more women, professionals, college educated, and young people.”
Ulf Brunnbauer, an Austrian historian at Regensburg University, agrees that Freedom Party backers are not largely protest voters. “This might have been the primary motivation of its voters in the 1980s and 1990s,” he told Foreign Policy, “when the party broke the political duopoly that governed Austria since 1945. But today, the Freedom Party is party of the establishment, too. Austrians understand very well that the party is racist and authoritarian, Kickl himself full of hatred and notoriously pro-Russian and anti-immigrant. Most people voting for them do so out of ideological conviction. It almost reflects the average person in Austria society.”
And this, Brunnbauer said, is in part a consequence of the Freedom Party’s meticulous groundwork. “They have systematically invested into propaganda work and built an alternative media universe. The party has created a new sense of ethnocentric patriotism and engaged broadly in local government. The Freedom Party learned from [Italian theorist Antonio] Gramsci: Political power rests on cultural power. The Freedom Party has transformed Austria’s political culture.”
This process—again, much like in Germany—includes the consternating transformation of the country’s traditional conservative party, the People’s Party. Whether as a result of the shifts in societal opinion or the Freedom Party’s success in tapping it, the conservatives have put up no fight against the far right, but rather have embraced ever more of its stances on migration, even etching in its program that asylum-seekers should have their valuables confiscated at the border, purportedly to cover the costs of processing them.
This year alone, Karl Nehammer, the country’s conservative incumbent chancellor, has dangled one piece of populist bait after another in the face of conservative constituencies, such as the denial of social benefits to asylum-seekers during the first five years of their tenure in Austria. “Our aspiration is a social welfare system for those who can’t work—not for those who don’t want to,” he said, referring to migrants. And, in addition to offshoring asylum procedures outside of the EU, the party has proposed that there should also be prisons in third countries for sentenced migrants.
On the issue of immigration, opined Die Presse, a conservative Austrian daily, the People’s Party “is barely distinguishable from the Freedom Party.” And as in Italy, France, and elsewhere, it didn’t pay off: “All those in favor of such policies have long been voting for the Freedom Party,” the newspaper concluded. The 11 percent points that it shed went largely to the Freedom Party.
Kranebitter and other observers note that the pandemic played an important role in the Freedom Party’s reemergence. When Austria made vaccination compulsory late in 2021, Kickl exclaimed: “As of today, Austria is a dictatorship.” The Freedom Party’s poll ratings shot up to around 30 percent, concluding its brief stay in the post-Ibiza scandal doghouse.
“Austria not only pursued a very restrictive coronavirus policy,” argued the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a Swiss-based, German-language daily newspaper, “but many of its measures also differentiated between vaccinated and unvaccinated people. This caused deep resentment among those who felt discriminated against by the state. This feeling has occupied those affected much longer than the memory of arduous restrictions.” The fiasco wounded all three government parties (the People’s Party, the Social Democrats, and Greens) in one shot, while the Freedom Party stood defiantly against what many felt as injustice.
As it was in 2000, the Freedom Party is now among Europe’s far-right pioneers again, proving that a once-discredited, ultraright party can still upturn and defile an entire political culture. The lesson will not be lost on Central Europe’s other pro-Russia populists.
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