Cat and Mouse
The far-right Freedom Party has a new leader, Herbert Kickl, following Norbert Hofer's resignation last week
Servus!
I wrote to you back in April (“Hofer or Kickl?”) that it was clear that the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) believed a general election was nigh and that, as such, the party would finally have to choose who was going to lead them into that battle: its chair Norbert Hofer or its parliamentary faction boss Herbert Kickl. As it turns out, the party did not have to choose per se. Hofer made the decision for them.
On Tuesday afternoon of last week, a tweet was sent from Hofer’s account announcing he was to step back from front-line politics and resign as head of the FPÖ. A few minutes later, the tweet had been deleted. The confusion was cleared up shortly thereafter when Hofer confirmed to oe24 that, indeed, today was his last day as FPÖ leader. This partly had to do with his health, Hofer having just finished three weeks rehabilitation for a slipped disc. More so, however, his resignation was precipitated by the tumult within the party and Kickl’s evident designs upon the top job.
When the cat’s out of the house, the mice have a fair, said Hofer, and so it was that in the most brutal political fashion, Kickl made his move for the leadership while Hofer was on his sick bed. A week prior to Hofer’s resignation, Kickl had said at a press conference, apropos of nothing, that he would like to lead the FPÖ into the next election. The question of how long the FPÖ’s dual leadership would last has weighed upon the party since it was conceived in the chaos of the fallout from the Ibiza affair in the summer of 2019. Hofer, evidently, was done with the games and the speculation and announced his retreat to Pinkafeld.
The FPÖ’s national executive committee of the FPÖ met Monday to choose the party’s next leader. After several hours of discussion, Kickl was selected unanimously. A leadership contest had been anticipated, but the competition had melted away before the committee had sat down to debate. The most likely contender, Manfred Haimbuchner, deputy governor of Upper Austria, has a vital election to fight in the state in September. Other names that were floated—former defense minister Mario Kunasek or Vienna party leader Dominik Nepp—never even threw their hats into the ring.
The path, then, was clear for Kickl—who, in any case, had the clear support of the FPÖ parliamentary party as well as several state-level party leaders—and a man whose political career began in the shadows has now stepped into the limelight. He started his political career as a campaigner and speech writer for two FPÖ leaders: Jörg Haider and Heinz-Christian Strache. It was Kickl who conceived of such memorable campaign slogans as ‘Daham statt Islam’ (‘At home instead of Islam’) or ‘Wien darf nicht Istanbul werden’ (‘Vienna must not become Istanbul’). An MP since 2006, from December 2017 to May 2019 Kickl served as interior minister, a period marked by scandal surrounding his handling and politicization of the state intelligence services.
With Kickl as leader, the FPÖ will likely chart a confrontational, hard-right course, one marked by corona-skepticism and all-out opposition to chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The assumption is that this will take the FPÖ out of the governing game, but the fact remains that, were the ÖVP to win the next election, be it this year or in the future, the first party it would turn in seeking to form a coalition would be the FPÖ. In 2000, the toxic Haider stepped aside as party leader in order to facilitate the first ÖVP-FPÖ coalition government. Perhaps his former speechwriter would do the same.
Bis bald!
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