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The Freedom Party is in the driver’s seat to lead the next government after the centre right agreed to coalition talks.
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Herbert Kickl, whose far-right FPÖ won the most seats in September’s elections, may now be impossible to keep from the chancellery. (Photo by Christian Bruna/Getty Images)
Austria descended into political disarray over the weekend following Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s surprise resignation, a step likely to lead to the far-right Freedom Party taking control of the government for the first time.
A lurch to the right in Vienna would further threaten the stability of the EU at a perilous moment, creating a Russia-friendly, Eurosceptic populist bloc in the centre of the continent, encompassing Hungary, Slovakia and Austria, with Czechia poised to join after elections in the autumn.
That would be welcome news to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who has sought to use his Central European allies – albeit with mixed results – to sow division in the EU over the war in Ukraine.
A rise to power by the Freedom Party (FPÖ) would dispel any lingering doubts that Europe’s populist forces remain resurgent amid a worsening economic outlook and continuing backlash against the political establishment’s failure to resolve tensions over the arrival of millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa over the past decade.
Nehammer, a former military officer who became chancellor in 2021 after a political scandal forced Sebastian Kurz to resign, said he would step down as leader of both the country and the centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP).
In a short video statement late Saturday, he said his resignation as chancellor would take effect in the coming days and pledged “an orderly transition.”
The decision, which followed Friday’s collapse of talks to form a three-way centrist coalition, opens the door for the ÖVP to pursue coalition talks with the FPÖ, a collaboration Nehammer had steadfastly ruled out due to what he considered to be the extremism of the party’s leader, Herbert Kickl.
However, that view was not shared by everyone in the ÖVP, especially among those in the party’s business wing, which is keen to see the next government undertake more aggressive reform to jumpstart the economy, now in its second year of recession.
As if on cue, ÖVP officials signalled on Sunday that the party was now prepared to hold talks with the FPÖ, which won Austria’s general election in September with 29% of the vote.
After the other four parties represented in parliament refused to engage in talks with the FPÖ, its victory appeared to be a pyrrhic one – until Sunday.
“We are not to blame for the lost time, chaos and the enormous loss of confidence that has been created here,” Kickl said in a statement late Sunday.
“To the contrary: it’s clear that the FPÖ was and remains the only stable factor in Austria’s domestic politics.”
Kickl’s high card for highest office
A coalition between the FPÖ and ÖVP, which carried 26% of the vote in September to finish second, would have a commanding majority in parliament.
The only real question now is whether Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen, who has the power to reject candidates for high office, would be willing to accept Kickl as chancellor. Theoretically, the FPÖ could field another, less controversial candidate, but Kickl has made it clear he wants the job.
A university dropout, Kickl, 56, began his political career as an acolyte of Jörg Haider, a pioneer of far-right populism in Europe who turned the FPÖ into a force to be reckoned with in the 1990s.
Kickl, who campaigned on a promise to be a Volkskanzler and turn Austria into a “fortress” against migration, has a long history of making incendiary comments about foreigners and Islam.
As interior minister in 2018, for example, he floated the idea of “concentrating” refugees in special centres, prompting accusations that he was drawing on the rhetoric of the Third Reich – which he rejected. He also ordered that refugee registration centres be renamed “departure centres.”
A dyed-in-the-wool European, Van der Bellen, a former leader of Austria’s Greens, has made no secret of his distaste for Kickl and his party, which delights in attacking the EU and has even flirted with pulling Austria out of the bloc.
Following the September elections, the president opted not to follow custom and formally assigned Kickl, as leader of the strongest party, the task of building a coalition. This was a symbolic yet clear gesture.
Yet, following Nehammer’s move, symbolism alone will not be enough to block Kickl.
If the FPÖ and ÖVP agree to form a government and nominate Kickl as chancellor, Van der Bellen could exercise his veto, but that would thrust the country into a constitutional crisis.
Such an outcome would likely only serve the interests of the FPÖ. In recent polls, the party has garnered as much as 37%, suggesting that if Van der Bellen were to call a new election, the FPÖ would emerge even stronger.
In November, the party won a key regional election in the province of Styria, winning 35% of the vote to take control of the state for the first time.
Therefore, Van der Bellen may be more likely to simply grin and bear it. He acknowledged this on Sunday, saying in a prepared statement that he scheduled a meeting with Kickl for Monday “to discuss the new situation.”
An uneasy alliance
The ascension of the Freedom Party, which was founded in the 1950s by a group of unreconstructed Nazi veterans, would mark the culmination of a decades-long evolution during which it honed its anti-EU, anti-immigrant messages, delivering itself from the political fringe into the seat of power.
The party first gained international attention in the 1990s under Haider, who used the issue of migration—at the time from the former Yugoslavia—to galvanize voters and challenge the mainstream. By 1999, Haider had built a formidable following, vaulting his party into second place in national elections.
The FPÖ went on to form a coalition as the junior partner to the ÖVP. The decision by the centre-right to lock arms with the FPÖ was so controversial at the time that it prompted the EU’s other members to impose “diplomatic sanctions” on Vienna – a symbolic move that, in practice, meant bilateral visits were halted.
In retrospect, Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, looks more like a trailblazer than a pariah.
Today, far-right parties, most of which borrowed heavily from his populist playbook, are in government from Rome to Budapest to Amsterdam and climbing the polls in much of the rest of Europe.
With Brussels growing increasingly accustomed to such events, an FPÖ-led government would likely prompt little more than a sigh of exasperation. Nonetheless, it would be a watershed for Austria, a country whose national politics have been dominated by the centre since World War Two.
Ultimately, the People’s Party and Social Democrats’ dominance and reliance on clientelism to maintain their power created an opening for FPÖ to exploit. In the September election, the two centrist parties received just 47% of the vote, their worst-ever combined showing.
The trauma of Ibiza
Though the FPÖ and ÖVP are broadly aligned in many policy areas, such as taxes and migration, their previous two alliances at the national level were anything but harmonious.
Their first coalition, formed in 2000, ended after a couple of years, mainly due to intense infighting within the FPÖ.
The second outing in 2017 under Kurz imploded in more spectacular fashion amid the so-called Ibiza affair.
The government collapsed after just 18 months following the release of a surreptitiously filmed video showing then-FPÖ leader and Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache seeking to trade political favours for cash to a woman he believed to be the niece of a Russian oligarch.
The footage, several hours long, was filmed months before he took office in a private villa on the island of Ibiza, where Strache was vacationing. The ensuing investigations have occupied Austria’s justice system ever since and played a central role in forcing out Kurz.
Given that history, one might expect the ÖVP to be even more sceptical of a tie-up with the FPÖ, especially since it will have to cede the chancellery to the party and play second fiddle.
Yet after meeting on Sunday and agreeing to change course, senior ÖVP officials insisted they were unperturbed.
“We’re not going to sell our souls,” said Wilfried Haslauer, the governor of Salzburg.
[Edited by Owen Morgan/Alice Taylor-Braçe]
Updated: 06-01-2025
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