After a tough few years, Austria’s far right is back

Shortly after his populist far-right Freedom Party made gains in Sunday’s state elections in Salzburg, Herbert Kickl, the party’s leader, struck a triumphant tone.

“We’ve succeeded in further strengthening our solidarity with the people,” Kickl said. “The next step, by fall at the latest, is a run for the chancellery and a government under [Freedom Party] leadership.”

That would have been crazy talk a few years ago. But in Austria, time’s arrow always seems to point in one direction.

The Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) has had a tough few years. In the spring of 2019, the FPO was the junior partner in a coalition with the conservative People’s Party (OVP). But that May, German media published a secretly recorded video of then-FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache on the Spanish island of Ibiza, in which he made shady deals with a woman he believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch. The video and the resulting fallout, known as the “Ibiza affair”, toppled the right-wing government and led to snap elections, in which the FPO lost nearly 10 points and dropped to just 16% support among the electorate.

Nearly four years later, it’s as if Ibiza never happened. In Sunday’s vote in Salzburg, the FPO won nearly 26% of the vote, gaining nearly seven percentage points compared with 2018. The People’s Party, meanwhile, the party of current Chancellor Karl Nehammer, went backwards. The Salzburg vote was the latest proof that the FPO has, like an intrepid DJ, shaken off the stank of Ibiza and somehow, once again, come out on top.

It’s not just Salzburg. Back in late January, the FPO won 24% of the vote in the region of Lower Austria, a big jump over 2018. And nationally, the FPO is averaging 28% in the polls, comfortably ahead of the centre-left Social Democrats, which have 23% support, and the OVP, with 21%. In other words, after years of rebuilding, Austria’s far right has not only regained its previous support but become the country’s dominant political force.

Like its counterparts in countries across Europe, the FPO has weaponised rising inflation and energy prices to increase its support since last fall. It has also capitalised on a range of other domestic political developments, including the unpopularity of the current OVP-Greens government, the relative weakness of the Social Democrats, and a series of scandals within the governing OVP that have made the Ibiza scandal look almost appealing by comparison.

Experts say the far-right party’s efforts to differentiate itself from other parties on the various crises of the past few years — whether the government response to the coronavirus, the economic aftermath of the war in Ukraine, or Austria’s tepid response to Russian aggression — have added wind to its sails and helped the party win back some of its previous voters.

“This is what the Freedom Party has always managed very well: to occupy the position that’s ‘free’,” said Peter Hajek, a Vienna-based pollster. “If everyone else is basically in favour of the sanctions against Russia, the [FPO] will go to the opposite side. And that is, of course, the advantage of being a populist, even opportunist, party.”

The FPO has also benefited from the fact that voters have short memories — and, because of scandals and troubles in other major parties, Ibiza feels like a distant memory. After investigators found that former OVP chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his allies had spent government funds on doctored opinion polling to bolster their political position, Kurz resigned from office in fall 2021. Since then, a steady stream of revelations from the scandal surrounding Kurz and his inner circle have continued to come to light, giving voters the impression that the FPO is the less corrupt party after all.

“A lot has happened in between, and much of it has to do with the weakness of [the FPO’s] opponents,” Hajek said. “After the problems with Sebastian Kurz and his allies, many people of course said, ‘Okay, what the Freedom Party did isn’t actually that bad, the other guys are worse.’”

This, combined with a leadership battle within the Social Democrats that has weakened the party’s image as a viable alternative, has driven a solid section of the voters who supported the OVP after Ibiza back to the FPO. “I think people have really lost trust [in the governing OVP], and a protest vote against ‘those up there’ is always a way out,” said Ruth Wodak, an expert in populist far-right rhetoric who works at the University of Vienna. “And the left-wing opposition is currently not proposing an alternative program.”

The FPO was founded in the 1950s and, in its early years, was led by former Nazis. It was among the first of the modern populist far-right parties to gain prominence in Europe: in the 1980s, under the leadership of the late FPO politician Jorg Haider, the party developed the kind of nativist, hard-line immigration rhetoric it’s known for today. Kickl, the current party leader, served as Haider’s speechwriter.

In 1999, the party won nearly 27% in parliamentary elections and became the junior partner in the government at the time, a move that drew major international censure. (That coalition fell apart in 2005 due to infighting and scandal.) In the years since then, the cordon sanitaire — an explicit agreement among the other mainstream political parties against collaborating with the FPO — has all but disappeared in Austria. When the FPO entered government again in late 2017, the move gained comparatively little international attention.

That lack of a solid cordon sanitaire is on display in Lower Austria, where the state-level OVP recently formed a governing coalition with the FPO. That came despite the fact that the local FPO leader, Udo Landbauer, had previously resigned from office over a scandal involving a Nazi-era songbook, used by his far-right fraternity, that made light of the Holocaust. (He stepped down in 2018 and was back in party leadership later that year.) Since taking office, the Lower Austrian government has pursued a series of policies that serve as red meat to far-right voters, including trying to refund fines to those who violated coronavirus-related restrictions during the pandemic and creating a restaurant subsidy for locales that serve “traditional and regional” food (in other words, schnitzel and strudel).

Whether the FPO can translate these recent state-level victories into similar gains at the national ballot box remains to be seen. The country’s next parliamentary elections are slated for autumn 2024, although there’s a chance they’ll be called earlier. Even if the FPO were to end up back in the national-level government, as Kickl predicts, it may not stay there for long.

“The problem always begins when they get into government: when you govern, you sometimes have to push through policies that are unpopular, and the populists don’t want that,” Hajek said. “It’s always been the case that as soon as the FPO is in government, they have a problem.”