Austrian Election Strengthens Right Wing Parties

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Legislative elections in Austria Oct. 15 saw right-wing parties make gains, continuing a trend seen last month in neighbouring Germany.

Austria uses a proportional representation voting system to elect members of the country’s 183- seat National Council.

Sebastian Kurz’s centre-right Austrian People’s Party (OVP) emerged as the winner, with more than 31.4 per cent of the vote, good for 61 seats, while the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), led by Heinz-Christian Strache, took second place, with 27.4 per cent and 53 seats.

On the other hand, incumbent Chancellor Christian Kern, whose centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPO) came first four years ago, saw his party decline to 26.7 per cent of the vote and 52 seats, their worst showing in modern Austrian history.

As has been the case in many other countries these days, there was a stark polarization between urban left-leaning Vienna and the more conservative rural parts of Austria. The capital, whose metro area houses nearly a third of the country’s population, is at odds with its hinterland.

While the OVP emerged with the most seats, the FPO was the big winner, overtaking the Social Democrats and dictating the course of the election, with a campaign that centred largely around immigration and fears of radical Islam. 

Founded in 1956, the FPO emerged from the short-lived Federation of Independents, launched after the Second World War by former Nazis who had been stripped of their voting rights.

The FPO platform included the denial to migrants of access to welfare payments. They also advocated closer relations with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the so-called Visegrad group of European nations that tend to be more nationalistic than other European Union countries.

Those countries have refused migrant quotas approved by a western-dominated majority of EU member states. They also reject proposed reforms that would transfer more power from national governments to Brussels institutions. The FPO also wants a more decentralized EU. 

Strache intimated that Hungarian-American financier George Soros, a bête noir for European nationalists, is the shadowy instigator behind the refugee crisis and sanctions against Russia.

In the campaign, Kurz was forced to shift his People’s Party closer to the hard-line anti-immigration stance pushed by the FPO. 

He touted his role in the spring 2016 decision to close Austrian borders to new arrivals, and also emphasized his efforts to pass Austria’s recent so-called burqa ban.

Many Austrians fear that the roughly 90,000 refugees in the country of 8.4 million from 2015 to 2016 are draining its resources, Kurz said.

The FPO was able to criticize the cozy relationship between the two other parties, who have governed Austria in a grand coalition for the last decade, denouncing their control of public life. 

Opposition to the two-party duopoly attracted voters who objected to this “red-black elite,” as they called it, referring to the social SPO and Christian Democratic OVP, respectively.

Last year the FPO narrowly missed out on capturing Austria’s presidency for the first time, with its candidate Norbert Hofer defeated in the final round after a dramatic showdown with Green Party candidate Alexander Van der Bellen. 

In this parliamentary election, however, the Greens failed to meet the four per cent threshold needed to win seats and were wiped out. 

Should the FPO enter government, as seems certain, Hofer would most likely become Austria’s foreign minister. Strache declared that the result showed that his party had “arrived at the centre of society.”

Julia Ortner, a political commentator for the newspaper Vorarlberger Nachrichten, said that “after what we have experienced elsewhere in Europe, especially in Hungary and even in the United States,” allowing right-wing parties into government “is no longer a taboo.”