Look Who's Back
Inflation, immigration, and the specter of an uncertain winter have created the conditions for the far-right Freedom Party's re-emergence
Servus!
In recent months, I’ve written that Austrians are living through a political unmooring. The electorate is experiencing fatigue with the People’s Party (ÖVP)—its listlessness and corruption—and the coalition. It knows what it doesn’t want—more of the same—but remains unclear on the alternative. The ground had been shifting in the direction of the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) and a possible three-party ‘traffic light’ coalition with the Greens and the NEOS. Now, the tectonic plates are moving once again.
The most recent poll published by the newsweekly Profil showed that the rise of the SPÖ has been halted, stalling out for now at 27 percent. The continued decline of the Greens (10 percent), meanwhile, now means a parliamentary majority for a traffic light coalition no longer exists. This is not because the ÖVP is re-emerging. Their numbers remain in the doldrums (22 percent). Rather, the insurgent political force in Austria right now is the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ, 25 percent).
Inflation and its effects including rising prices and falling incomes are traditional social democratic themes. But it is the FPÖ that is capitalizing on the fear and uncertainty inflation has begotten. Refugees are also back in the news, the federal government having resorted to constructing tent encampments in order to house asylum seekers using the Balkan route to access western Europe. Combine inflation and immigration with the bitter legacy of the pandemic—and recall that the FPÖ was the COVID-skeptic party in parliament—and suddenly you have a set of political conditions from which the opportunistic far-right can benefit.
The FPÖ’s rise from being a 16 percent party at the 2019 general election to a 25 percent party now takes place within the context of far-right successes across Europe. Following September’s election in Italy, the leader of a neo-fascist party is now the prime minister of Italy. The Sweden Democrats are now the second-largest party in Sweden and are supporting Ulf Kristersson’s right-of-center coalition from without. In June’s parliamentary elections in France, the National Rally did better than ever and are an increasingly coarse, rambunctious, and disruptive presence in the legislature.
But the far-right is also an old, sad story in Austrian politics that dates back to imperial times and the emergence of parliamentary democracy when greater German nationalists and liberals constituted the so-called ‘third camp’ of Austrian politics in opposition to the socialists and Catholics1. Whether in the guise of the Greater German People’s Party (GDVP), the Federation of Independents (VdU), or today’s FPÖ, the third camp has long had a vehicle in Austrian parliamentary politics. The Austrian far-right is not an aberration but a political reality.
We’ve been here before, in other words. Once a marginal tendency, in the 1990s the flamboyant provocateur Jörg Haider rode a wave of anger and frustration directed towards the grand SPÖ-ÖVP coalition to power. That experiment in government with the ÖVP ended in ruin and schism, with Heinz-Christian Strache left to pick up the pieces. The 2015 refugee crisis took him and his party back into power in 2017, before Strache’s own transgressions in Ibiza blew up his coalition with the ÖVP in 2019. Rise, and self-destruction, resurrection, and self-ruination. Now Austria is heading into a rough winter, and the phoenix is emerging from the ashes anew.
Bis bald!
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Austria’s Catholic conservatives were Austrian nationalists in contrast to the third camp’s greater German nationalism. Before the rise of Nazism, the socialists were also pan-Germanists, which distinguished them from Austria’s communists who believed in Austrian independence.