Austria’s new electoral earthquake

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The inclusion of the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) in a governing coalition in Austria in 2000 sent shockwaves across Europe. Today’s more muted response to the FPÖ topping a national Austrian election for the first time reflects the extent to which the hard right has normalised itself though its gains since then — from the AfD in Germany to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Marine Le Pen in France. Other parties have said they will not allow FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl to become Austrian chancellor in a coalition, which may leave it outside government. But the FPÖ’s latest breakthrough crystallises the dilemmas for countries grappling with a rising hard right across the continent.

Like populists elsewhere, Kickl’s FPÖ owes its success in part to disillusionment with mainstream parties that have dominated government in Austria since the 1950s. The centre-right People’s party (ÖVP) has been dogged by recent corruption scandals; the Social Democrats (SPO) have taken an inward-looking turn under a leftist leader. The bedrock of FPÖ support, too, is discontent with immigration, in a 9mn-strong country where 1.8mn were born abroad.

Record net immigration in the past two years has surpassed levels even during the mass inflow of migrants to Europe from Syria and elsewhere in 2015-16 — though many this time have been refugees from Ukraine. (The FPÖ, long sympathetic to Moscow, wants to end Austrian aid via the EU to Kyiv.)

Kickl has skilfully added an extra constituency, however, especially among young people — by channelling resentment of Covid lockdowns and an abortive mandatory vaccination law from 2022. The FPÖ casts itself as defender of personal liberties against an authoritarian establishment. And, by flirting with taboos from Austria’s political past — election posters called him the Volkskanzler, a phrasing used by Hitler — Kickl has deployed a provocative politics designed to enrage the mainstream and consolidate support among anti-establishment voters.

Austria faces the risk that excluding the FPÖ from government might only strengthen it. Either way, its success sends warning signals to the EU. It shows trying to “tame” extreme-right parties by exposing them to government has no guarantee of success. Since its hard-right turn under Jörg Haider in the 1990s, the FPÖ has twice been in a governing coalition. It crashed out of its latest spell in government in 2019 after its then leader Heinz-Christian Strache was filmed offering sleazy deals to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch’s niece. Now a new leader has delivered its best ever election result.

It achieved its breakthrough, moreover, not by appearing to moderate its politics, like Le Pen and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, but by tacking further rightward. Like Germany’s AfD, it has dabbled with identitarian ideas including “remigration”, or deporting people of immigrant origin.

The FPÖ’s electoral success will bolster the outsized role it has long played in European politics. Kickl was an architect of a new rightwing movement this summer, Patriots For Europe, with Hungary’s illiberal Viktor Orbán and former Czech premier Andrej Babiš. It has taken in the parties of Wilders and Le Pen, Spain’s Vox and others to become the third-largest faction in the European parliament.

Though not all its members are in government, through its own activities and the hard right’s tendency to drag centre-right parties rightward, the group is set to exert influence on issues ranging from support for Ukraine to immigration policy to climate scepticism. In 2000, the FPÖ’s breakthrough seemed a temporary aberration. For all Europe’s efforts since then to domesticate the hard right or keep it outside a cordon sanitaire it is now clear that, for the foreseeable future, it will be a fixture on the political landscape.