Austrian election offers far right a springboard back to power

VIENNA — It’s Europe’s most important election this year, yet amid 2024’s flurry of other “most important elections” — such as the nail-biting race in France — chances are you haven’t heard about it. 

On Sunday, Austrians go to the polls in a do-or-die ballot that could vault the country’s neofascist Freedom Party (FPÖ), founded in the 1950s by former SS officers, into power. POLITICO’s Poll of Polls puts the FPÖ narrowly ahead in the run-up to voting day, at 27 percent, a nose ahead of the People’s Party (ÖVP) at 25 percent. 

This matters because Austria, despite its modest size of only 9 million people, plays an outsized role in Europe when it comes to questions of trade and migration. The FPÖ’s belligerent stance towards Brussels — its leadership flirts with the idea of “Öxit,” an Austrian-style Brexit — is certain to lead to more tensions between the EU and Vienna. 

Most worryingly, an FPÖ win would establish a populist, Russia-friendly Central European bloc stretching from Ukraine’s border with Slovakia and Hungary to Austria’s frontier with Switzerland, making it easier for President Vladimir Putin to sow discontent at the heart of Europe. 

Despite its colorful history of political scandal and corruption, Austria has long competed above its weight category in the EU.  That’s largely due to geography. Its location at the center of the Continent has long made the country a fulcrum for trade — the EU’s main north-south corridor cuts through the Tyrol, while Austria’s borders to the east and southeast have served as western Europe’s gateway to the Balkans. 

Geography has also made Austria the crossroads for migration flows from the Middle East and Africa. Over the past decade, the country has taken in more refugees per capita than any other EU country, fueling the FPÖ’s resurgence.    

Similar to the former East Germany, which never undertook a full reckoning with its Nazi past (and has voted in droves for the far right in recent weeks), Austria spent most of the postwar period running from history, spinning the fiction that it was Hitler’s “first victim.” 

Even though the country has made some progress on that front in recent years, the decades it spent living in denial left a deep mark on the country’s political culture, which explains why it’s possible for a party literally born out of Nazism to draw such strong support. 

The party maybe have evolved into the kind of anti-migrant, anti-Islam populist force that has taken hold across much of Europe, but it began as a political refuge for former Nazis. Not only has the FPÖ not disavowed that past, it embraces it, at least in private, with the leading party figures regularly getting to trouble for paying quiet tribute to their Nazi forebears. 

Haider’s acolyte

Led by a diminutive philosophy-dropout turned far-right ideologue named Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ, which has vowed to close Austria’s borders and “remigrate” anyone it deems to be foreign, has been leading the national polls since the fall of 2022. 

It’s an idea that created a political uproar in Germany earlier this year following a report that “remigration” had been discussed by a group of prominent far-right figures over dinner in a Potsdam villa. That hasn’t stopped the FPÖ leader from prescribing it for Austria.

“Remigration is long overdue!” a defiant Kickl said this month on the campaign trail. 

Kickl, an acolyte of Jörg Haider — the once-in-a-generation political talent who transformed the FPÖ from a fringe party into a mainstream force by weaponizing the issue of migration — took over the party in 2021 as it was still reeling from a massive corruption scandal that had forced it from power in 2019.

Though the party has been in government in recent decades — only to  crash out in spectacular fashion — it has always played second fiddle. A win on Sunday could hand Kickl and his band of far-right extremists the biggest levers of power for the first time. 

Some in Austria’s establishment believe that Kickl would inevitibly moderate should the FPÖ gain power, à la Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy, who has taken a more pragmatic course than most expected since becoming Italy’s prime minister two years ago. Yet there is little in Kickl’s past to suggest he would do so. 

To understand what it could mean to have Kickl behind the wheel, one needn’t look further than the FPÖ’s last stint in power six years ago, when he was interior minister. 

In his first weeks in office, Kickl oversaw a wholesale assault on the country’s intelligence service, which he and his party suspected of having infiltrated the FPÖ with informants. 

In the course of a police raid on the spy agency’s headquarters in early 2018, a databank containing years of secret communication between Austrian intelligence and Western services, including the CIA and MI6, was seized by police. Authorities never determined whether copies of the so-called Neptune hard-drive were made, but Austria’s Western partner services — concerned over Kickl’s party’s close ties to Moscow — responded to the unprecedented breach by suspending intelligence sharing. 

On the question of migration, the FPÖ’s bread-and-butter issue, Kickl took a similarly unorthodox tack. In 2019, he decided to rename Austria’s asylum registration centers “Departure Centers,” going so far as to put up new signage. 

Kickl’s plans to create what he calls a “Fortress Austria” were dashed by the sudden collapse of the government in May of 2019 after a video emerged of the FPÖ’s then-leader offering to sell political favors to a woman he believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch. 

The ensuing scandal, known as the Ibiza affair after the Spanish island where the video was surreptitiously recorded, engulfed Austria’s political system and continues to occupy the courts to this day. 

Electoral arithmetic

Even if the FPÖ wins on Sunday, it’s far from certain it will succeed in building a government. Most of the other parties have ruled out working with the far right. 

The party’s fate depends the center-right ÖVP, which currently leads Austria’s government alongside the Greens. The ÖVP has a long (and some would say checkered) history of collaborating with the FPÖ. In 2000, the party became the first in Western Europe to enter a coalition with far right, breaking a taboo that prompted Austria’s EU partners to impose bilateral “diplomatic sanctions” on Vienna. 

That government collapsed in acrimony and scandal after three years, but the ÖVP decided to have another go in 2017 under Sebastian Kurz, its then-wunderkind. That experiment ended with the Ibiza implosion just 18 months later.

Kurz ran into his own trouble not long after and though his party remains in power, it’s still picking up the pieces. While the ÖVP’s current leadership, under Chancellor Karl Nehammer, insists it would never accept a Chancellor Kickl, they haven’t ruled out another Freedom Party figure. 

While there’s a possibility the ÖVP, even if it finishes second, could build a three-way coalition with Social Democrats and smaller party, such as the liberal Neos or the Greens, history suggests otherwise. 

In recent regional ballots, the ÖVP has taken a hard line on the FPÖ only to soften after the election day and pursue coalitions with it. Ultimately the far right is closer to ÖVP on policy. What’s more, a two-way coalition is easier to manage. 

About the only thing one can say for sure about the shape of Austria’s next coalition is that the ÖVP, which has been in government without interruption since 1987, is almost certain to have a seat at the table. 

When it comes to dealing with Kickl, the ÖVP, even as runner-up, will be able to rely on Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, to run interference. Under Austria’s constitution, the president appoints the government and can reject candidates for chancellor and ministers. 

A former Green party leader with a visceral dislike for the FPÖ, Van der Bellen will be loathe to have his legacy tarnished by allowing a far-right ideologue take power. 

To justify rejecting Kickl — if it ever gets that far — Van der Bellen, a dyed-in-the-wool European, is sure to invoke Austria’s place in the EU, a higher good in his view that he has argued is endangered by the far right. 

In other words, it might be up to the EU to save Austria from itself.