The Guardian view on the Austrian elections: an old threat in a new guise
Back in 2000, when the late Jörg Haider’s far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which had won 27% of the vote in the general election the previous autumn, joined the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) in government in Vienna, governments in Europe and beyond reacted with shock and outrage. The EU imposed diplomatic sanctions. The European parliament said Austria should be suspended if the new government breached European principles. Israel withdrew its ambassador. The New York Times
urged the Clinton administration to do likewise. In the event, the ÖVPFPÖ coalition survived its pariah status uneasily for five years, then fell apart in 2005.
Today, 17 years on from that first coalition, a second coalition between the two parties of the right now seems likely. In Sunday’s Austrian general election the People’s party and the Freedom party emerged as the big winners, with 32% and 26% of the vote respectively after a campaign in which they vied with one another to attack migration through the Balkans and the perceived threat to Austria from what the ÖVP leader Sebastian Kurz called “political Islam”. Between them, the two parties increased their share of the vote by 13%. Mr Kurz greeted the result as a mandate for change. A new alliance between the two is therefore the most likely outcome, though it is not the only one. The social democratic SPÖ, which held its own on Sunday with 27%, voted today to begin talks with the Freedom party so see if it could thwart Mr Kurz. A renewed centre party coalition between the ÖVP and the SPÖ, of the kind that has ruled since 2006, is not out of the question either.
Any thought that the FPÖ has become an untouchable ally for the mainstream parties in Austria has thus fallen at the first fence. International calls to treat any Austrian government that includes the FPÖ as a pariah are conspicuous by their absence too. These are developments that should be deplored. Yet there are many reasons for the more fatalistic approach. One is that the FPÖ has refocused since 2008. Its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, has tried to soften the neo-Nazi image, articulating an Islamophobia widely shared in parts of Austria. Another is Mr Kurz’s reinvention of the ÖVP as a vehicle for his brash youthful low tax populism, which has rebranded one of the pillars of Austria’s political corporatism. A third is the volatile interface between unemployment, migration and a society which, in some eyes, has seen itself as the frontline defence of Christendom against Islam since at least the time of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683.
Like the rest of Europe, politics in Austria exhibit distinctive national characteristics as well as broader continental ones. But Austria’s move to the right has striking echoes of that in neighbouring Hungary. It is a reminder that, two years after the migration crisis in the Balkans, the issues still trigger anger and threaten establishment parties. The new government in Vienna, whatever form it takes, is likely to add Austria’s voice to others in central and southern Europe that will approach the problems of Europe from a more sharply nationalistic standpoint.
The rightward lurch in Austria, coinciding with the showdown between Catalonia and Spain, is also a reminder that the populist ferment in Europe takes different forms but is far from dead. Hopes that the election of President Macron and the re-election of Chancellor Merkel marked the end of the populist wave are clearly an oversimplication. Mrs Merkel will be only too conscious of this; her party lost an important regional election in its one-time stronghold in Lower Saxony on Sunday. The deepening of the union proposed by Mr Macron in September looks a more daunting prospect than before. Nevertheless, when Theresa May joins other EU leaders for this week’s Brussels summit, she should not go as another nationalist disrupter but as the leader of a country whose interests lie in a constructive and engaged approach to our continent’s many problems.