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The victory of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria’s parliamentary election on Sunday, according to projections, is another landmark moment in the seemingly relentless march of nationalist, anti-immigrant pro-Russian forces across the EU.
It would be the FPÖ’s first ever triumph in a national poll, and caps a year of illiberal gains across the continent, which started with the win of Robert Fico, a eurosceptic, in Slovakia last September, then of Dutch anti-Islam firebrand Geert Wilders two months later.
This summer France’s Rassemblement National came first in European parliament elections and notched up its highest ever tally in the snap ballot for the National Assembly in July.
In September, Alternative for Germany (AfD) topped the poll in the eastern state of Thuringia, the first win for the far-right in a regional election since the second world war.
The trend is likely to continue in 2025. Czech nationalist Andrej Babiš, whose ANO party is aligned with the FPÖ, is looking to exploit the disarray of the governing coalition in Prague in national elections.
The RN is likely to be the big beneficiary if, as many people suspect, French voters return to the polls next year. And the AfD will attempt to convert its regional successes into national gains in federal elections next autumn.
The advances of far-right and populist forces have tilted the balance of European politics and policymaking to the right on immigration and the green transition, whether at the EU level or in national capitals.
If the FPÖ were to take power in Vienna, albeit in a coalition, it would create another EU government whose support for Ukraine against Russian aggression cannot be fully relied upon.
If Babis also prevailed, it could mean an illiberal alliance spanning the four central European countries that once belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire. This time its power centre would be Budapest, where Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has built an autocratic alternative to the liberal democratic pro-EU mainstream.
The FPÖ’s vote share of 29 per cent, according to projections, is a personal triumph for party leader Herbert Kickl.
He has engineered a remarkable comeback for a party that crashed out of government in a corruption scandal in 2019 when its then leader and Austria’s vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was caught in a bribery scandal offering favours in return for illicit party donations to a woman purporting to be the niece of a Russian oligarch.
Kickl’s victory is also part of a worrying sub-trend to the rise of the far-right and populist right in Europe.
As Wilders in the Netherlands and the AfD in eastern Germany have shown, to win elections, it is no longer necessary to detoxify your brand or moderate your positions, as Giorgia Meloni and, to a lesser extent, Marine Le Pen, have done in Italy and France respectively.
Kickl may not be aligned with the most extreme elements of his party, but he is happy for it to associate with, and borrow ideas from the identitarian movement, including “remigration”: the deportation of people of immigrant origin, including Austrian citizens, to their countries of heritage to create a more “homogenous” society.
He rails against “climate communism” and propagates the wildest conspiracy theories, particularly about Covid. He has found a receptive audience among Austrians who seethed about the country’s tough pandemic rules and remain angry with its political class.
The FPÖ, which was founded by former Nazis in the 1950s, has long been a fixture of Austrian politics and has previously served three times in government. It was normalised long before Europe’s other far-right parties.
One theory is that Austria, by presenting itself as the first foreign victim of National Socialism, lacks the same culture of remembrance and therefore resistance to the far-right as Germany.
Another is that Austrians are simply fed up with the failures of a mainstream establishment that has monopolised power and its spoils since the second world war.
The centre-right, which had dominated Austria’s politics for 80 years but is projected to slip to second place in the election on 26 per cent, will not want to play a junior role in coalition with the FPÖ and has ruled out joining a government that includes Kickl.
It will probably now try to form a government with the social democrats and liberals. Kickl will seek to exploit this as an establishment stitch up.
Still, Austria provides the counterargument to those who say the best antidote to populists is to include them in government, forcing them to share responsibility for it and the compromises it entails. The FPÖ bounced back from its last stint in power. It is now more popular, and more radical.