Kenneth Schmidt highlights the Austrian Freedom Party’s (FPÖ) rising momentum, marked by its victory in Styria’s provincial elections, as a clear challenge to Austria’s political establishment and its attempts to sideline nationalists from power.
Readers will recall the triumph of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in the September 29th parliamentary elections in that alpine country. They received 29.20 % and got in first place. It would have been normal procedure in that country for President Van der Bellen to ask Herbert Kickl to at least make an attempt to form a government. As we commonly see in the West, democratic norms are abandoned when national-conservatives get anywhere near the levers of power. Van der Bellen, a fanatical green leftist, decided to flaunt national tradition and asked the leader of the lame center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Karl Nehammer, to form an ideologically bizarre coalition between his ÖVP, the socialists of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and NEOS, a small neo-liberal party. No government has been set up yet.
Van der Bellen and Nehammer are dragging their feet in the hope that if their proposed unwieldy coalition ends up being stillborn, they can find some excuse to deny the Freedom Party the leading role in a government that they rightly deserve. The people of the Austrian province of Styria (near the Slovenian border) have made the devious plotting of the center-right and center-left less likely to succeed. While the world’s attention was drawn to the extraordinary results in the first round of the Romanian presidential elections, the Styrians made it quite clear that their sentiments were with the Freedom Party. In elections for that province’s legislature, the FPÖ came out on top.
In the provincial elections, the FPÖ got an impressive 34.8 % of the vote (17 seats), followed by the ÖVP with 26.8 % (13 seats) and the SPÖ with 10 seats. Van der Bellen’s beloved Greens got a measly 6.2 % and three seats. A clear message was sent to the ossified Austrian political establishment that the Styrians were in no mood to stand by and watch the Freedom Party get blocked from power. This is only the second provincial legislature to fall to the FPÖ. They have had nearby Carinthia for many years. The era when the established parties can use anti-democratic shenanigans to hold back the power of nationalism in Europe is coming to a close.
