Austrians vote with the far right in the prospect of a historic victory

Austrians went to the polls on Sunday in a general election in which the far-right narrowly defeated the conservatives to claim a historic victory in the EU alpine country.

The Freedom Party (FPOe), which is topping the polls, has been in government several times but has never won the nationwide vote, although even if it wins, it is uncertain whether it would be able to form a government.

Since the graft-tainted party was taken over by cutthroat Herbert Kickl in 2021, its popularity has surged amid voter anger over migration, inflation and Covid restrictions, just as far-right parties elsewhere in Europe have seen.

In opinion polls, FPOe currently has 27% support.

“Austrian political memory is very short. I expect there will be a coalition between the conservatives and the far right, which is worrying,” health consultant Bernd Lunglmayr told AFP in Vienna.

The ruling conservative People’s Party (OeVP) is lagging behind, but its leader, 51-year-old Chancellor Karl Nehammer, has managed to narrow the gap in recent weeks.

Promising “stability instead of chaos” in the latest OeVP polls, the support is around 25%.

“Problems can be solved much better with certainty than with fear,” Nehammer said after casting his vote in Vienna, urging people to vote to “define our future direction.”

– “causes fear” –

Polling stations opened at 7:00 a.m. (05:00 GMT) and the last polling stations will close at 5:00 p.m. Projections based on postal voting and vote counting from stations that will be closed early should be announced shortly thereafter.

More than 6.3 million of Austria’s nine million inhabitants are eligible to vote.

“The FPOe mainly creates fear and never has anything constructive to contribute,” 29-year-old researcher Theres Friesacher told AFP after the vote in Vienna, citing corruption scandals that have often engulfed the party.

Long a political force in Austria, the FPOe government’s first involvement in 2000 under the Conservatives sparked widespread protests and sanctions from Brussels.

Since then, the number of far-right parties has been growing across Europe, with outgoing governments focusing largely on defense following a series of crises including the Covid pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“This time it will be different, this time we will win these elections. This time we will succeed,” Kickl told a crowd of cheering supporters outside Vienna’s main cathedral on Friday.

In his speech, he once again sharply criticized EU sanctions against Russia, advocated the far-right concept of “re-emigration” which calls for the expulsion of people of non-European ethnic origin who are deemed to have failed to integrate, and went on a rampage for the outgoing government.

At the height of the migration crisis in 2015, Austria – alongside Germany and Sweden – was one of the preferred destinations for refugees since then.

The support of the conservative OeVP has fallen from over 37 percent in the last national elections in 2019.

Their junior coalition partner, the Greens, currently has eight percent of the vote in the polls, almost half of what they got in 2019.

– No “people’s chancellor” –

However, analysts widely predict that even if the FPOe wins the most seats, it will not have enough seats or partners to form a government.

Nehammer again repeated his refusal to work under Kickel, who called himself the future “Volkskanzler”, people’s chancellor, as Adolf Hitler was called in the 1930s.

Chancellor Kickla could be thwarted by an unprecedented three-party coalition led by OeVP with the Social Democrats, who are polling at just over 20 percent, and a third party, probably the liberal NEOS.

If OeVP – which has been part of every government since 1987 – wins the most seats or performs almost as well as FPOe, analysts see the possibility of a coalition with the far right as a junior partner.

The views of both sides “converge on many issues” and “creative solutions” can be found in the Kickel case, Andreas Eisl, a researcher at the Jacques Delors Institute, told AFP.

Both previous OeVP-FPOe governments were short-lived.

The latter, headed by the charismatic then leader of OeVP, Sebastian Kurz, collapsed as a result of the spectacular FPOe corruption scandal in 2019, after just a year and a half in power.