It's Herbert Kickl's Summer
The far-right leader told the ORF he supported direct democracy and wanted to be a chancellor of and for the people and not the 'system.'
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Servus!
Two weeks ago, Austria’s public broadcaster, the ORF, began its annual round of Sommergespräche, hour-long interviews with the leaders of the country’s parliamentary political parties broadcast during the long summer break. NEOS leader Beate Meinl-Reisinger and vice-chancellor Werner Kogler of the Greens have already had their turn; new Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) leader Andreas Babler and chancellor Karl Nehammer (People’s Party, ÖVP) are still to come. On Monday, all eyes were on the man who might be Austria’s next chancellor: far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) boss Herbert Kickl.
A former speechwriter and campaign manager who ascended to the top rank in a party broken and beleaguered by scandal, on the face of it, Kickl is not a natural candidate for high office. Short and bespectacled, he has a weedy appearance, and in some of his interactions, Kickl has a touch of Ron DeSantis about him—a particular and unshakeable weirdness. Unlike DeSantis, however, who seems incapable of being human on the campaign trail, Kickl’s verbal dexterity—his skills that made him an effective speechwriter and sloganeer—allow him to communicate his ideas as party leader in a way that, as of now, 30 percent of the Austrian public find compelling.
As of August, the FPÖ retains its lead in the polls and Kickl has his sights on the chancellery. He wants to be Austria’s Volkskanzler, its people’s chancellor. In Monday’s interview with the ORF’s Susanne Schnabl, held in a back room at Austria’s renovated parliament building, Kickl said this meant a chancellor of the people and for the people as opposed to of the ‘system’ and for the system. It’s a neat rhetorical trick that distills Kickl’s worldview and pitch to Austria’s voters: that the FPÖ is on the side of the Austrian people against the ‘system’ and the Einheitsparteien, the unity parties of the ÖVP, SPÖ, Greens, and NEOS, that defend it.
President of the Austrian parliament Wolfgang Sobotka has previously noted Kickl’s tendency to deploy what could be seen as National Socialist terminology. The term Volkskanzler was used widely in association with Adolf Hitler in Nazi propaganda in 1933. The Nazis also used the word System and associated terms like Systempartei, Systempolitiker, and Systempresse, system party, system politician, and system press, with contempt to denigrate both the Weimar Republic and the Austrofascist state, both of which the Nazis usurped in 1933 and 1938 respectively. Kickl rejected his comparison in Monday’s interview.
His conversation with Schnabl was rangy, unfocused, and, as it progressed, increasingly tetchy. We learnt that the FPÖ is opposed to asylum but in favor of skilled migration targeted to fill labor shortages in certain professions (with the proviso, it would seem, that those migrants, having fulfilled their work requirement, go home afterwards). Kickl did not distance himself from the far-right identitarian movement and would not concede that extreme weather events are linked to climate change. The FPÖ remains committed to direct democracy and Euroscepticism, ideas that meet at a possible Öxit referendum down the line. As if it weren’t clear before, chancellor Kickl would drive Austria in a right-wing populist direction.
With the ÖVP weakened by corruption allegations and the SPÖ charting a course to the left, the FPÖ seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. What might stop Kickl’s progress, though, was also on view in Monday’s interview. First, regional political scandals in Styria and Vienna and policy divisions between the FPÖ’s federal and state parties. Second, that when Kickl rails against the system, it would be entirely fair to point out that the FPÖ were part of the federal government from 2000 to 2005 and 2017 to 2019. Right now, they are also the junior partner in coalition with the ÖVP in three of Austria’s nine states. The FPÖ cannot be against the system, then, when it is an inherent part of it.
Bis bald!
Kurz Charged
Austrian anti-corruption authorities have filed criminal complaints against former chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his ex-chef de cabinet Bernhard Bonelli. Both have been charged with giving false evidence before a parliamentary investigative committee. The presumption of innocence applies.
Fewer New Austrians
Naturalizations in Austria fell by 18.3 percent in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year. Statistik Austria general director Tobias Thomas attributed this trend to a drop-off in the number of descendants of victims of National Socialism applying for citizenship.
Whither Hitler’s House?
A new documentary to be released September 1, “Who’s Afraid of Braunau?”, shines a spotlight on the house in which Hitler was born. The property on Braunau am Inn’s main street remains disused, with a project to turn it into a police station announced in 2019 yet to come to fruition.
The Vienna Briefing will return on September 13.