To The Right, Ever To The Right
The far-right Freedom Party achieved a historic victory in Sunday's European elections in Austria, though the final outcome was tighter than anticipated
Servus!
The results are in for Sunday’s European elections in Austria:
Freedom Party (FPÖ): 25.4 percent, + 8.2 pp
People’s Party (ÖVP): 24.5 percent, - 10.0 pp
Social Democratic Party (SPÖ): 23.2 percent, -0.7 pp
Greens: 11.1 percent, - 3.0 pp
NEOS: 10.1 percent, + 1.7 pp
Communist Party (KPÖ): 3.0 percent, + 2.2 pp
Democratic—Neutral—Authentic (DNA): 2.7 percent
Translated into seats in the European Parliament, that leaves the FPÖ with six seats, the ÖVP and SPÖ with five each, the Greens with two, and the NEOS with two.
This was a historic outcome in an Austrian context: the FPÖ’s first-ever victory in an European election, even if it was not their best result on a percentage basis (for that occurred in 1996). The far-right achieved this by winning over 221,000 voters who voted for the ÖVP in 2019 as well as 100,000 prior non-voters. Exit polling shows FPÖ voters were motivated by immigration, a negative view of the EU, and a desire to stick it to the current ÖVP-Green coalition. The FPÖ came first in their traditional stronghold, Carinthia, as well as in Upper Austria and Styria, an outcome which bodes well for regional elections due to take place in the state later this year.
The race was in the end, however, tighter than polls had projected. The ÖVP vote declined by 10 percentage points on 2019 in the absence of their great pull factor, former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and yet they succeeded in turning out enough of their core vote—789,000 voters in states like Tyrol, Salzburg, and Lower Austria—to beat the SPÖ into second place. Looking ahead to September’s national elections, all hope is not yet lost. Is the same true for the SPÖ? While they won in Vienna and Burgenland, the stagnant nature of the party’s vote is surprising and disconcerting given the government’s unpopularity and the change in party leadership last year. Of particular concern will be the 159,000 2019 voters who chose not to vote this time around. The party may be headed towards civil war.
The SPÖ did win 67,000 voters from the Greens, who lost one of their three seats in the European Parliament as their vote declined by three percentage points. While exit polling indicated lead candidate Lena Schilling’s personal and professional conduct had minimal impact on the way people voted, in Vienna, Green MEP Thomas Waitz received almost double the number of write-in votes as Schilling—a signal that Green voters wanted Waitz to lead the party’s delegation in Brussels, not Schilling. As for the NEOS, they succeeded in doubling their parliamentary representation, pinching tens of thousands of voters from the ÖVP, SPÖ, and Greens in the process, though their final result—10.1 percent—did not hit the heights projected in polling data.
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Austria was one of two countries—the other being France—in which a member of the European Parliament’s far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group emerged as the largest party. The overall picture in Europe was of a swing from the center towards the right, with liberal and green parties on the decline to the benefit of far right and right-wing populist forces. The European People’s Party (EPP)—the center-right grouping of which the ÖVP is a member—remains the largest faction in the European Parliament, however, and was able to grow its seat share, propelled by a good result in Germany for the Christian Democratic Union.
The next step in Brussels will be to choose the next President of the European Commission, one of the EU’s two executive branches. That person will be nominated by the European Council, the other wing of the executive which is made of the EU’s heads of state and government, which in Austria’s case means chancellor Karl Nehammer. That nominee must then be approved by the European Parliament.
I’ve written about this in more detail in a recent feature for Ha’aretz, but in brief, it is likely that sitting Commission president Ursula von der Leyen will be put to Parliament by the Council. Not only did her EPP win the parliamentary elections as mentioned, but they also hold more than 40 percent of the seats on the Council. Last week, von der Leyen was in Vienna as part of a pre-election tour of Europe, drumming up support of her bid for a second term.
If Austria lends von der Leyen their support, the question is, what will they demand in return? Each European Union member state gets to nominate one member of von der Leyen’s next Commission, her cabinet of ministers. The ÖVP reportedly wants to send sitting finance minister Magnus Brunner to Brussels and hopes to secure an economic portfolio for him. Herein lies the implication that the ÖVP wants von der Leyen to pursue a prudent economic agenda—and its man, Brunner, would be there to keep her and the other member states in line.
Bis bald!