Far-Right Populist Party Loses Election

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Austria may have dodged a right-wing bullet on Dec. 4. The country held a rerun of last spring’s presidential contest, after that result was declared invalid by Austria’s constitutional court after irregularities in the counting of postal votes.

Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the Freedom Party (FPO), the far-right nationalist movement originally formed in the 1950s by former Nazis, was beaten by a former Greens politician, Alexander Van der Bellen, by 53.6 to 46.4 per cent.

Hofer had garnered some support from mainstream conservatives in the People’s Party, one of the country’s two mainstream parties, which declined to throw its weight behind Van der Bellen. The Social Democrats, the other major party, did back the winner.

The FPO is anti-foreigner, anti-Islam and anti-globalization. The party saw its support surge due to worries over immigration as well as weak economic growth.

Memories of last year’s Europe’s migration crisis, in which nearly one million people passed through Austria, a country of 8.4 million, are still fresh.

Hofer promised to “put Austria first” by introducing strict border controls and banning the burqa. “Islam is not a part of Austria,” Hofer said recently. “The kind of politics that is permitting a changing face of Austria and Europe has to be opposed.” He wanted, he asserted, to lead a country that was secure “for our children and grandchildren.”

Johann Tschurtz, the FPO’s deputy governor of Burgenland, a border region next to Hungary, also attributed the party’s popularity with a rejection of “elites” in Vienna, the Austrian capital.

“All the actors, the artists in Vienna are against Norbert Hofer -- and, yes, the comics, too. The ordinary voters don’t like that,” he maintained.

Hofer’s election would have sent shockwaves through Europe, as it would have made him Europe’s first far-right head of state since the Second World War.

He had made clear that he wanted to be an interventionist head of state, threatening to dismiss a government if it raises taxes and calling for referendums on a range of issues.

Hofer is also an irredentist, who in 2015 indicated that he’d like to incorporate South Tyrol, the German-speaking province in northern Italy that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into the Austrian state.

He has since proposed offering dual nationality to citizens of the autonomous province.
The claim was made on the basis of ethnicity and history. The region, known as Alto Adige by Italy, was annexed by Rome in 1918, following the Austrian defeat in the First World War.

Yet despite dictator Benito Mussolini’s attempt to “Italianise” the area by forbidding German and pushing through Italian vocabulary and culture, the population remained German-speaking.

After the Second World War, despite the region being granted autonomy, the locals continued to fight, sometimes even with violence.

They are Italian citizens but simply don’t feel Italian; German is spoken the vast majority of the 510,000 inhabitants of the region. Polls conducted in 2013 noted that 46 per cent of South Tyrol’s population would favor their secession from Italy.

Any attempt by Austria to reopen the issue would have led to yet more friction in an already fragile European Union.