Reinhard Heinisch

In the Austrian parliamentary elections on September 29, 2024, the populist radical right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) won with almost 28.8% of the vote, which the new party leader Herbert Kickl sees as a clear confirmation of his party’s political strategy and program. The governing Christian-conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) was far behind and lost 11% compared to the previous election in 2019.  Nonetheless, after trailing the Freedom Party in polls by even larger margins, the ÖVP and Chancellor Karl Nehammer had been gaining momentum in the weeks leading up to the election and almost closed the gap by achieving 26.3%. 

The biggest political losers of the evening were the opposition Social Democrats (SPÖ) under their recently installed new leader Andreas Babler, who achieved only 21% and their worst showing ever. He had positioned the party clearly to the left but was unable to gain a traction. The governing Greens also suffered a major setback, losing more than a third of their voters and ending up with 8.3%. Besides the FPÖ, only the small liberal party NEOS or New Austria managed to improve its result, reaching 9.2 %.

Nevertheless, this was an election like no other in Austria’s post-war history. For the first time, the FPÖ emerged as the strongest party with a clear claim to the chancellery and the right to form a government. For the first time, neither the Conservatives nor the Social Democrats (SPÖ), the two traditional major centrist political forces and founding parties of modern Austria, had come in first.

Why does it matter?

Austria voted soon after regional elections in Germany, where the radical right Alternative for Germany became the largest party in the German state of Thuringia and came in a close second in Saxony and Brandenburg. Austria continued this trend. With Hungary and Slovakia also led by radical populist and Eurosceptic politicians, there is a risk that Central Europe will turn away from liberal democracy. In Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as in large parts of the Balkans and Italy, nationalist and populist parties and politicians are either in power or form the main opposition. Against the background of the Austrian elections, the question was therefore whether this trend would continue in that country.

What is the political situation like in Austria?

As in other Western democracies, the competition between parties in Austria takes place along two dimensions or axes: the socio-economic and the socio-cultural. Austria’s long-established major parties, the People’s Party and the Social Democrats, traditionally compete on economic and social issues but differ on the role of the market as a regulatory authority vis-à-vis the state.  As Austria became a post-industrial society, new parties emerged that compete on issues of culture, identity, and the environment. Currently, the party NEOS and the Greens are represented in this socio-cultural dimension, as is the FPÖ. Although not a new party, it also focuses on identity and culture, but occupies the far right end of the socio-cultural spectrum. In this part of the political system, it enjoys a unique and exclusive position in attracting voters who are primarily concerned with traditional culture, national sovereignty, and immigration and related issues.

The growing importance of socio-cultural issues has led to a backlash that has strengthened the cultural right, which opposes globalization, European integration and immigration. This competition along the new axis exerts a pull on the “old” parties, ÖVP and SPÖ, forcing them to reposition themselves or risk losing voters to the new parties. At the same time, the established parties must be careful not to alienate their traditional “socio-economic” voters, usually older people who vote in large numbers but are declining as a voting bloc. Indeed, both parties have lost more than 50% of their voters over the past 30 years. The SPÖ is associated with the development of the Austrian welfare state, while the Conservatives represent the interests of business, the middle class, agriculture and the civil service. However, both parties have struggled to reconcile these different constituencies and have had particular difficulty attracting younger voters. The ÖVP’s strength lies outside the capital Vienna, especially at the provincial level, and its ability to recruit new political talent from the professional classes has mitigated its political decline somewhat. This has allowed it to maintain its role as Austria’s perpetual governing party, now in its 37th year of uninterrupted rule.

Out of government since 2017 and with weaker representation outside Austria’s few major cities, the SPÖ is also struggling with internal divisions between a progressive left wing, a more urban liberal segment, and a culturally conservative labor faction.  The inability to resolve these conflicts continued to play out in this election campaign. It was embodied in the clash between different leaders in the party, each associated with one of these currents, and has made it difficult for the Social Democrats to be an effective opposition party. The current SPÖ leader, Andreas Babler, a left-wing grassroots figure and mayor of a small town, emerged from a contentious leadership contest that ousted the previous party leader. Because Babler’s insurgent bid for the party chairmanship thwarted the planned installation of a powerful regional leader as the new party chair, his position in the SPÖ has remained weak and the lack of unity has cost the Social Democrats votes in the polls.

The Conservatives too, had their ups and downs. When they came under pressure from the radical right after a disappointing 2014 election result, they installed a charismatic and rhetorically gifted new leader, Sebastian Kurz, who tried to reposition the ÖVP and move the party far to the right. Emulating certain far-right policies, adopting some of the FPÖ’s positions on immigration and Islam, and projecting an image of a dashing young party leader cut from a different cloth, Kurz led his party to unprecedented electoral success in both 2017 and 2019. However, his policies and the fact that he then formed a government with the populist radical right, validated many of the FPÖ’s radical positions and made them mainstream. 

This strategy backfired when the conservatives ended their coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) after a scandal was uncovered in which the FPÖ leader was shown in a staged video offering political influence in exchange for financial support to a person posing as a wealthy Russian oligarch.  When the ÖVP then formed a new government with the center-left Green Party, the FPÖ, under its new leader Herbert Kickl, was able to rebuild its strength by pursuing a radical opposition course, using the COVID-pandemic and the governments restrictive policies as a means of mobilization. When the Conservatives became embroiled in a series of public corruption scandals and Kurz himself was indicted, sentenced for perjury and subsequently forced to resign by the Green coalition partner, the ÖVP found itself constantly on the defense.  Negative perceptions of the government’s handling of the COVID pandemic, with Austria among the countries with at times some of the highest reported rates of people affected, and the constant bickering between Conservatives and Greens over policy and ideology, led to record lows levels of public approval for a government. 

How do we explain the shift to the radical right?

Radical populism has a long tradition in Austria. In the 1980s, then FPÖ leader Jörg Haider transformed what was at the time a pan-German nationalist party, which included many Nazi sympathizers, into a populist party that focused less on Austro-German nationalism and more on public corruption and the insider politics of the two dominant parties, SPÖ and ÖVP. After the opening of borders at the end of the Cold War and Austria’s accession to the European Union in 1995, the issues of economic integration, immigration, identity and anti-EU policies became cornerstones of the FPÖ’s political agenda. However, the party was not monolithic, but tended to moderate somewhat in times when it sensed the Conservatives were willing to form a coalition with them 2000 and 2017. In both cases, the experiments ended in fiasco and the governments were ended prematurely. The FPÖ then always radicalized in order to gain support by appealing to their grassroots and core voters. 

The FPÖ is now led by Herbert Kickl, who is probably the most skilled communicator among Austria’s top politicians. He is disciplined, to the point, and able to tailor his communication to his audience. In his discourse he stresses the typical radical right-wing claims about the perils of immigration and asylum, the sinister role of Austrian elites, and the dangers posed by the European Union. He is indirectly supportive of Russia, blaming the war on the Ukraine, NATO, the US and the EU. He views the Green Deal as a Green plot by people he calls “eco-fascists” to dismantle Austrian industry. In comparison to previous leaders who had moderated when aiming for public office, Kickl engages in conspiracy narratives by considering climate change a hoax and the refugee crisis as something “possibly manufactured” by elites to replace the native population with immigrants.  In the new EU parliament, his party had joined the faction of Patriots for Europe together with Hungarian Fidez, the Italian Lega Nord, and the French Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen. 

Kickl is a strong admirer of the Hungarian model of Viktor Orban and his program can be read as a blueprint for establishing an illiberal type of democracy. Critical media, non-compliant courts, and politically divergent teachers are to be reined in through a variety of measures ranging from financial pressure and disciplinary action to emergency legislation. Ad hoc plebiscites would be used to invalidate election results and terminate governments that run afoul of popular sentiment, while minority protections and basic rights would be subject to political whim. For example, naturalized citizens are threatened with losing their Austrian citizenship and being deported if they do not “integrate sufficiently”. Equal protection and minority rights would become the subject of a tug-of-war between the government and national and supranational liberal institutions, which the Freedom Party would instrumentalize to promote national cohesion.

What is likely to happen now? 

It is ironic that the Freedom Party’s clear victory now makes its participation in government less likely than if it had come in second. Chancellor Nehammer and the ÖVP have ruled out forming a government with Kickl as a cabinet member and are even less willing to be junior partners in a coalition led by Kickl. If the FPÖ had done less well, Kickl could have easily stepped aside and the FPÖ would have been satisfied with the junior role. A coalition with the SPÖ, while numerically possible, would only have a one or two-seat majority and thus be precarious. Moreover, it would be called a coalition of losers. Adding the NEOS party would increase the parliamentary majority and include an election winner, but a coalition of three parties with such different agendas is extremely fragile.

In short, Austria faces politically uncertain times and difficult negotiations, which are made even more complicated by the role of the Austrian federal president Alexander Van der Bellen from the Green Party. He is in a constitutional powerful position to veto any government and has stressed that he considers Kickl unfit for high public office and that he will not swear in a government that is not explicitly pro-EU. Van der Bellen has a popular mandate and is in his second and final term, so he is free to make this choice. The only constraint he faces is that any government he appoints or supports must ultimately have a majority in parliament. Thus, if the FPÖ and ÖVP find a way to come together in the end, there is little the president could do short of provoking unpopular new elections, which the FPÖ would likely win with an even larger majority. Both from the perspective of a European Union as a united and powerful global actor and of Europe as a beacon of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the prospect of the Freedom Party in government would not be a welcome one.