Austria Wins Far Right – The New York Times

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party got a real shot at leading the country’s next government this weekend after talks between the three main parties collapsed.

The rise of the Freedom Party will bring its stalwart leader Herbert Kickley to the chancellorship and mark a new high point for the rise of the far right in Europe.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen’s party, who won the most seats in the national assembly in September’s election, was expected to task the two with forming a coalition at a meeting on Monday. The meeting could be the first official step on the way to a new government.

Mr. Kickl, whose party was founded in the 1950s by former members of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary police, campaigned on a strong anti-immigrant platform. The party has a history of smearing migrants in Austria as criminals and welfare sponges.

He called for a temporary suspension of new asylum seekers and a law banning asylum seekers from becoming Austrian citizens. Mr Kickl has promised to turn Austria into a fortress, and his party introduces him to campaign speeches by using the word “Volkskanzer”, a reference to the rise of German fascism.

The senior leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party, the ÖVP, known by its Austrian initials, announced on Sunday that it is open to coalition talks with the Freedom Party, despite a campaign promise by the ÖVP not to form a coalition with the party. as long as it was run by Mr. Kickle.

Austria’s ÖVP Chancellor Karl Nehammer announced on Saturday that he will resign from both the chancellorship and the party leadership.

The development of events has worried the observers of Austrian politics.

“The picture we present to the world now is of course not just a shift to the right, but instability – some people even call it chaos,” said Peter Filzmaier, a political scientist at the Universities of Graz and Krems.

29 percent of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party. The ÖVP, which has been leading the Austrian government since 2017, received 26 percent of the vote. Until this weekend, it looked like the Freedom Party would be kept out of government, as all other parties refused to join a coalition with it.

Christian Koker, who was rushed to replace Mr Nehammer as head of the ÖVP on Sunday, told the media that he expected President van der Bellen to ask Mr Kickl to start coalition talks. Mr. Coker also said that “if we are invited to negotiate, we will accept this invitation.”

It could take many weeks, perhaps months, for a government led by Mr. Kickl to be inaugurated. It would be among the first overtly far-right governments in Europe, reflecting how voters are disaffected by migration and economic turmoil and are increasingly turning to the right.

For example, in France last year, the far-right National Rally party won nearly a third of the vote in the European Union parliamentary elections, and in late 2023 Dutch voters gave Geert Wilders’ far-right anti-Islam Party a crucial victory. It caused the new government to go to the ballot box 4 months later.

The Freedom Party is now part of five state governments and was a junior partner in a coalition with the ÖVP in the national government until it collapsed in a humiliating scandal involving a video of a fake Russian heir and party leader.

Before that, Mr. Kickle served as the country’s interior minister, responsible for public safety and migration, among other things.

After coalition talks between conservatives and progressives are concluded, coalition talks between the Freedom Party and the ÖVP may go more smoothly, with political analysts in Vienna noting that the parties have much in common on many fronts.

Laurens Ennser-Jedenastik, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, said the ÖVP’s commitment last summer not to work with the Freedom Party was more about a strategy to try to remain the largest party in the coalition and keep the chancellor.

“All the barriers are now being dismantled very quickly – which shows how superficial this exclusionary strategy is,” he said.