Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has been leading the opinion polls for over a year, hovering near 30 percent ahead of June elections for the European Parliament. It’s a rise of some 10 points from the party’s showing in the 2019 European elections, fuelling the hopes of its leader, Herbert Kickl, for a victory in Austrian legislative elections in September.
“Stop the EU madness,” reads a slogan on a far-right Freedom Party (FPO) poster for the European elections, featuring European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky embracing – and flanked by a ruinous backdrop featuring a tank, helicopters, a syringe, wind turbines and a migrant boat.
Now polling near 30 percent, the FPO is poised to win the most votes when Austrians cast their ballots to choose their representatives for the European Parliament on June 9.
The FPO’s rhetoric – populist, Russophile, Eurosceptic and anti-vaccine – is favourably received by a significant share of the country’s electorate. If it continues to make headway in the run-up to the country’s September parliamentary elections, the far right could emerge as the ruling party in Austria next autumn.
The party has led in polls since late 2022. Ahead of the European elections, the FPO – which already holds three of Austria’s 19 MEP seats – also has a comfortable lead, with 28.2% of support, according to an Ipsos poll published on March 19, ahead of both the centre-left Social Democratic SPO party (22%) and the centre-right People’s Party or OVP (21%).
The far-right party also has a big advantage on social media. Harald Vilimsky, head of the FPO party’s list for the European elections, has four times the following of rivals Helmut Brandstatter of the New Austria and Liberal Forum (NEOS) party or Lena Schilling of the Greens, according to the Austrian news agency APA.
Playing the victim in the face of scandal
Created in the decade following the end of World War II, the FPO presented itself in its early years as pan-Germanist, with the aim of preparing for the return of National Socialism to Austria. “Most of the party’s leaders were former members of the Nazi party,” explains Benjamin Biard, research fellow at the Brussels-based think tank, Centre de recherche et d’information socio-politiques (CRISP). “But that doesn’t mean this is still the case today,” adds Biard, a specialist on the far right in Europe.
The FPO first came to power in 1983-1986, abandoning its original ideological foundations and adopting a “liberal” free-market stance that led it to take part in a coalition government with the Social Democrats of the SPO.
But with the arrival of controversial leader Jorg Haider in 1986 the FPO was sidelined, and as an opposition party it moved increasingly to the nationalist and populist right, with Haider openly relativising or reinterpreting Austria’s Nazi past. He eventually resigned in 2000 after making controversial statements about the Third Reich.
The FPO once again showed its strength at the polls in the 1999 parliamentary elections, when it became the second-largest political party. In February 2000, it joined a governing coalition with Wolfgang Schussel’s ruling People’s Party.
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According to Biard, this coalition was one of the first examples of “a new phase in the development of the extreme right in Europe since World War II” in which parties are no longer content “to act as major opposition forces, but have ambitions to reach the seat of power in order to exert a direct influence on public policy”.
So although the FPO experienced internal divisions and electoral setbacks, it again returned to the heart of Austrian political life in 2017, joining the government formed by the OVP’s Sebastian Kurz. This new experience of power was once again short-lived, this time due to the “Ibiza-gate” corruption scandal that forced former FPO leader Heinz-Christian Strache to step down as vice-chancellor in 2019.
The impact of Ibiza-gate nevertheless had a limited effect on the party, believes Biard. In the last European elections of 2019, the FPO, despite losing ground, remained the third-largest party with 17.2% of the vote.
“The dissatifaction of its electorate – or a segment of it – does not seem to have been borne out over the long term,” says Biard.
Despite a new scandal linked to the FPO, accused by the ruling Greens party this month of enabling Russian espionage, the party “is probably holding up well”, says Biard.
One explanation for the FPO’s ability to weather scandal “lies in the fact that far-right parties have traditionally taken to presenting themselves as victims of the system as a whole” and are adept at using victimhood as a way of deflecting critics, Biard explains.
Capitalising on people’s frustrations
In addition to this anti-system rhetoric, the FPO’s other major themes are typical of far-right parties: the rejection of immigration, the defence of a form of Austrian “patriotism”, a very hardline stance on Islam and an emphasis on Eurosceptic rhetoric.
As with most far-right parties, while FPO voters are motivated by ideology they also vote “to express their dissatisfaction with, or even disenchantment with, the way democracy works today”, says Biard.
In a recent interview with the Austrian news agency APA, Vilimsky, lead candidate of the FPO’s EU parliament list, stated that his party’s mission was to “kick the establishment in the butt”.
In a study published in April, Patrick Moreau, a political scientist specialising in contemporary Germany and Austria, cited some of the reasons for the FPO’s leading position in the polls, notably the impeachment of former chancellor Sebastian Kurz and other People’s Party corruption scandals, the Social Democrats’ internal crisis, high inflation, rising prices, as well as immigration.
Given the FPO’s habit of linking questions of security and immigration, “Austria feels exposed,” says Biard. Former chancellor Kurz saw his approval rating rise after he called for the closure of Austria’s borders.
Biard notes that the FPO’s hardline immigration stance doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality. What counts for these far-right parties “is being able to create a sense of fear within society in relation to these migratory issues, whether they are real or exaggerated”, he says.
According to an analysis published in 2017 by Hans Winkler, former editor of the regional daily Kleine Zeitung, Austria is “at the crossroads of all migration routes in Europe” and was one of the three EU countries most affected by the “great wave of migration” in 2015 and 2016. Austria took in 95,000 asylum seekers, more people per capita than Germany.
The FPO has “been able to mobilise a large section of voters by sticking close to the frustrations of the population”, Moreau writes in his study for the Fondapol (Foundation for Political Innovation) think tank. “The nature of voter discontent favours the FPO, which builds support on these themes.”
Exit from the EU?
“Imagine a red button to get Austria out of the madness of the EU. I wouldn’t hesitate for a millisecond to press it,” Vilimsky declared at the FPO party conference in Vienna in mid-April.
Without going so far as to discuss Austria leaving the EU, Vilimsky underlines the FPO’s radical stance towards Brussels, one shared by the far right in Italy, France and the Netherlands.
However, most far-right European parties “are now toning down their positions, not in favour of leaving the EU but rather of an in-depth reform of its institutions”, explains Biard. The Dutch Party for Freedom, for example, finally withdrew a proposal to leave the EU from its programme.
At the European Parliament, the FPO is part of the Identity and Democracy group, which it co-founded in 2015 (then called the Europe of Nations and Freedoms). The group is the sixth-largest in the current European Parliament, with 59 MEPs from eight countries.
If the populist parties do well in the June 9 election, Vilimsky’s FPO is hoping to unite the Identity and Democracy group under a “common roof” with the parties of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which shares ideologies with the Freedom Party.
According to Biard,”seeing the FPO win more seats in the European Parliament is a credible scenario”. If voting intentions are confirmed, the FPO could win three more seats in Strasbourg.
(This article is a translation of the original in French.)
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