Austria has a new chancellor: Christian Stocker. After negotiating with the far right, he has finally established himself as a bulwark against authoritarianism and Herbert Kickl’s FPÖ. But what political project is Kickl putting Austria at risk of? Liam Hoare traces the trajectory of this party and its Nazi-sympathetic leader.
The day before critical parliamentary elections in Austria at the end of September, the Austrian Union of Jewish Students (JÖH) made a submission to state prosecutors in Vienna to bring charges against three candidates from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ).
The three men, Martin Graf, Harald Stefan, and Norbert Nemeth, had, on September 27, attended the funeral of Walter Sucher in Vienna. An old comrade, Sucher had been a FPÖ district councilor in Vienna for around 40 years. He was also an alumnus of the greater German nationalist student fraternity Olympia, which the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance has called a “center of right-wing extremism in Austria.”
At Sucher’s burial, visitors sang the old German song “Wenn alle untreu werden,” “If all become unfaithful.” Composed in 1814, a modified version served as the Nazi SS’s loyalty hymn (though the Vienna state court ruled in January that the original was sung at the funeral): “If all become unfaithful, we remain loyal / so that there will always be a battalion for you on Earth.” The JÖH suspected that Graf, Stefan, and Nemeth may have violated Austria’s law prohibiting National Socialist activity.
The Standard reported on the funeral on the same day that JÖH brought legal moves against the three prospective MPs. In the end, neither the report nor the prospect of legal charges had any impact on the outcome of the election. On September 29, the FPÖ won their first parliamentary elections since their founding in 1955, capturing 28.8 percent of the vote. In the end, it failed to muster enough support to form a government, unlike Stocker’s ÖVP, a politician who was still little known to Austrians last January.
“Once again, the Kickl-FPÖ has shown its radicalized face,” the conservative People’s Party (ÖVP) tweeted the day before the election in reaction to the funeral affair, using the surname of FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl whom the ÖVP attacked during the election campaign as a right-wing extremist, a Russian trojan horse, and a threat to national security. “The fact that Kickl tolerates such incidents proves that he has no qualms about having contact with right-wing extremists. We stand by what we have said: No cooperation with Herbert Kickl!”
Following the election, no party including the ÖVP having indicated their willingness to work with Kickl and the FPÖ, the ÖVP, center-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), and liberal NEOS entered negotiations to form a three-party government. Talks that began in November dragged on through Christmas, eventually collapsing in early January in bitterness and acrimony. Though they had agreed on consolidating Austria’s budget over the course of seven years to bring down the budget deficit, the three parties simply could not agree on how to do it.
Austria held its breath for several weeks: would Herbert Kickl become its first far-right chancellor since the Second World War?
Chancellor and ÖVP party leader Karl Nehammer then resigned, and with him out of the picture and under pressure from the party’s economic and business interests, the ÖVP’s no to Kickl became a yes and the party entered coalition talks with the FPÖ. This decision had Austria holding its breath for several weeks: would it be getting its first far-right chancellor since the Second World War, in the person of Herbert Kickl?
On the face of it an unassuming, bespectacled former philosophy student, Kickl’s political and linguistic talents have over many decades taken him through the FPÖ’s ranks to become party leader. In the process, he has taken what was already a far-right populist party in an even more radical and extreme ideological direction with closer ties to far-right, street-based movements. His vision for Austria would have transformed the country as we know it until today.
Kickl’s humble beginnings in Carinthia
Herbert Kickl was born in October 1968 in Carinthia, Austria’s southernmost state on the borders of Italy and Slovenia. He grew up an only child in a working-class family in an apartment in the Erdmannsiedlung, an unremarkable hamlet set in an Alpine valley near Lake Millstatt and the town of Spittal an der Drau. His parents ran a small grocery store nearby; his father had played football for the local team. His grandfather on his father’s side had joined the NSDAP prior to its being banned in Austria in June 1933.
Kickl was the first in his family to do his A-levels and go to university. In Vienna, he studied political science and media studies before switching tracks to philosophy. Though philosophy continues to play an important role in how Kickl conceives of himself and the world around him, he failed to complete his thesis on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and did not graduate. In their book on Kickl, Gernot Bauer and Robert Treichler describe Kickl’s worldview to this day as “Heimat, Helden, Hegel”: homeland, heroes, and Hegel.
That worldview is, moreover, defined by an opposition to the changes the soixante-huitards brought about or strived for, Bauer and Treichler surmise. This includes gender equality; Kickl dislikes gender neutral or inclusive language and the change made to Austria’s national anthem in 2012 that replaced the line “home to great sons” with “great daughters and sons.” He also views LGBTQ people and developments like same sex marriage or trans rights as a threat to the heteronormative nuclear family.
The Carinthia of Kickl’s childhood was a socialist stronghold. By the time he was studying for his A-levels, however, another star was on the rise: Jörg Haider, the flamboyant provocateur who took over the leadership of the Carinthia FPÖ in 1983 followed by the national party in 1986, changing the course of both FPÖ and Austrian history forever. Haider “absolutely interested me when I was at school,” Kickl has said. “He was completely unlike my teachers who were nearly all left-wing—in a rather cheap way.”
Kickl’s attraction to Haider—his flashy, uninhibited style and desire to shatter the two-party status quo that had governed Austria since the Second World War—was part of a drift among the Austrian working class away from the SPÖ and towards the FPÖ that began in the mid-1980s and accelerated through the 1990s. Rather than a mere observer, however, Kickl would become a central player in this development beginning in 1995 when, fresh out of university, Kickl joined the FPÖ’s political academy.
The FPÖ: From Nazi refuge to far-right populism
The FPÖ was established in 1955 as the successor party to the Union of Independents (VdU). It was, from its origins, a receptacle for unreconstructed former Nazis; its first leader, Anton Reinthaller, had been a brigadier general in the SS. The FPÖ arose out of what is termed the ‘third camp’ of Austrian politics: a residuum of those who fit into neither the ‘socialist camp’ nor the ‘Catholic-conservative camp’—a mixture of national liberals, Austrian nationalists, and greater German nationalists.
From its origins it was a receptacle for unreconstructed former Nazis; its first leader, Anton Reinthaller, had been a brigadier general in the SS.
Prior to 1986 when Jörg Haider took over the party, the FPÖ had been a minor force in Austrian politics. In 1970, it had an agreement with the SPÖ to prop up their minority government, which was led by Bruno Kreisky, an upper middle class Austrian Jew. In 1983, then at the end of his political life, Kreisky pushed his successor as chancellor, Fred Sinowatz, into a formal coalition with the FPÖ. The far-right’s then-leader, Norbert Steger, came from the party’s liberal. In 1986, Jörg Haider challenged Steger for the party leadership and won; the SPÖ, now under the stewardship of Franz Vranitzky, at once ended its coalition with the FPÖ.
Under Haider, the FPÖ went off in a clear far-right populist ideological direction. The party’s agenda was built on four pillars: anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-EU, and opposition to the SPÖ-ÖVP duopoly. Haider stretched the boundaries of acceptable discourse, stating in a June 1991 debate that the Third Reich had “had a proper employment policy.” Graduates of greater German nationalist student fraternities became emmeshed in the party’s upper echelons.
As the SPÖ and ÖVP’s popularity declined, so the FPÖ’s increased. Before Haider took over, they were a 5 percent party; in 1999, the FPÖ finished second in national elections with 26.91 percent of the vote. Sacrificing his dream of personal power, Haider took the FPÖ into government for the first time via a coalition with the ÖVP, one which sparked international condemnation including the withdrawal of Israel’s ambassador to Austria. One man who played a vital role in that 1999 campaign was Herbert Kickl.
Kickl, the party propagandist
Herbert Kickl joined the FPÖ’s political academy and think tank in 1995. Bauer and Treichler write that his training as a philosopher was valued in a party that had traditionally attracted members from the middle-class professions: lawyers, doctors, notaries, architects, and pharmacists. In 1995, Austria joined the EU—a move the FPÖ had opposed—and the party won 21.89 percent of the vote in national elections.
Kickl carved out a role working on the FPÖ’s political campaigns and writing speeches for Jörg Haider. In her book on Kickl, Falter journalist Nina Horaczek notes that Kickl wrote Haider’s line that then-French president Jacques Chirac—Europe’s most committed opponent of the FPÖ in government—was a “pocket Napoleon.” Kickl’s poison pen also targeted then-president of Austria’s Jewish community Ariel Muzicant: “I absolutely cannot understand how someone who has so many skeletons in his closet could be called Ariel,” with reference to the famous brand of washing powder.
Horaczek writes that Kickl was never close to Haider on a personal level. The FPÖ leader was a showy, ostentatious guy who drove a Porsche and often surrounded himself with handsome young men. Kickl, by contrast, maintains a more reserved public image, hiking in the mountains and eschewing parties and chic venues in the center of Vienna for humbler pubs and bars. On a political level, though, Bauer and Treichler argue Haider was Kickl’s “idol.”
Kickl’s slogans penetrated the public consciousness and ignited political debate: he has been described as a “kind of mini Goebbels”.
When Haider split the FPÖ in 2005 and went off to found the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), Kickl did not follow. He became the FPÖ’s general secretary and continued to guide the FPÖ’s political campaigns under the party’s new leader, Heinz-Christian Strache. Kickl liked simple slogans that rhyme like “Daham statt Islam” (At home instead of Islam) and “Pummerin statt Muezzin” (Church bells instead of the call to prayer) and more blood-and-soil lines like “Mehr Mut für unser ‘Wiener Blut’”—more courage for our Viennese blood. Muzicant once described Kickl as a “kind of mini Goebbels.”
Kickl’s slogans penetrated the public consciousness and ignited political debate. His other main achievement as party secretary was building up the FPÖ’s alternative media landscape through which the far-right communicates directly to its voters, avoiding the need for traditional media channels. Today, this includes the newspaper the Neue Freie Zeitung, the YouTube channel FPÖ TV (in which the FPÖ has invested heavily), and its Facebook account with over 200,000 followers.
Kickl as interior minister
The FPÖ’s first experience of government nearly broke the party. Under Heinz-Christian Strache, it was rebuilt. Aided by the unpopularity and instability of the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition and the 2015 refugee crisis, the FPÖ captured 25.97 percent of the vote in 2017. Once again, it was the ÖVP—this time led by Sebastian Kurz—who extended the hand of power to the FPÖ. Herbert Kickl became interior minister.
His time in office was brief but tumultuous. He wasted public money on attempts to establish a horse mounted police division and changing the names of Austria’s asylum absorption centers to “departure centers.” Foreign intelligence services ceased cooperation with Austria’s following raids conducted by the police against Austria’s own intelligence services. Politico described those raids as “part of a Moscow-led operation to discredit Austria’s spy services in order to rebuild them with new leadership under the Kremlin’s influence” and Kickl as being “ultimately responsible” for those raids.
Kickl was dismissed as interior minister following the collapse of the FPÖ’s coalition with the ÖVP in May 2019, during which Strache resigned as party leader. Initially, former presidential candidate Norbert Hofer took over the FPÖ, with Kickl becoming leader of the parliamentary party, but in June 2021, the baton was passed to Kickl, who in contrast to Hofer’s smoother, more consensual style pursued an aggressive, confrontational path.
Kickl has undoubtedly been the beneficiary of political circumstances, and the reemergence of the FPÖ since 2019 is part of a pan-European swing towards far-right populist movements. But the FPÖ’s swift ascendance has also come about because Kickl was able to take advantage of those circumstances, adopting a series of extreme minority positions to construct a voter coalition of people deeply unhappy with their own circumstances and the direction in which they perceive Austria is headed.
This started during the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially a supporter of strong countermeasures, the FPÖ quickly rolled in the other direction. Under Kickl, the FPÖ became Austria’s main COVID-skeptic party, critical of countermeasures like mask-wearing and social distancing, skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines, opposed to Austria’s short-lived vaccine mandate, and supportive of supposed alternative treatments for COVID-19 like the horse deworming agent ivermectin.
The FPÖ adopted a de facto pro-Russian position following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The party opposes Austria’s participation in the EU’s sanctions regime against Russia and its financial and humanitarian aid campaigns for Ukraine, arguing they violate Austria’s permanent neutrality. The FPÖ also benefitted from a peak in asylum applications in 2022—112,272 in a single year. The party supports what it calls “Festung Österreich”, Fortress Austria: a practical end to asylum in Austria and the creation of a hostile environment for asylum seekers in the country.
Kickl berates his opposition as Systemparteien, parties of the system, something Hitler also did in his speeches.
Nazi terminology and the power of the street
“Festung Österreich” is another captivating Herbert Kickl slogan. In a European context, the term Festung has been used in relation to migration since the 1990s: first in a critical sense by left-wing NGOs before being adopted by right-wing populist movements to advocate for hardline asylum and immigration policies. Before that, Festung Europa, Fortress Europe, was a term deployed by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to describe the swathe of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.
As FPÖ leader, Kickl has often played with Nazi terminology. He would have wanted to become Austria’s Volkskanzler, its people’s chancellor, a term used in Nazi propaganda to describe Adolf Hitler. He berates his opposition as Systemparteien, parties of the system, something Hitler also did in his speeches. Another favorite term is Volksverrat, treason against the people, which in 1933 became a crime under Nazi German law defined as “a crime directed directly against the German people by someone who seeks to undermine the political unity, freedom, and power of the German people.”
Kickl has also used the term Bevölkerungsaustausch, population exchange or transfer, which is adjacent to the French grand remplacement or great replacement, according to which non-white immigrants are being imported to Europe to replace its white populations both demographically and culturally. This conspiracy theory has a particular hold on Europe’s far-right including the identitarian movement, which supports ‘remigration,’ the mass deportation of immigrants.
On election night 2024, Kickl celebrated his great political triumph with members of the identitarian movement. Kickl has previously described the identitarians as a “right-wing NGO” as if it were equivalent to Greenpeace or the World Wildlife Fund. “Today, there are clear connections between the Freedom Party’s political and educational structures and its youth movement and the identitarians,” Andreas Peham, researcher into right-wing extremism, racism and antisemitism at Vienna’s Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, previously told Haaretz.
“And Kickl, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, doesn’t share this reticence about the power of the street,” Peham added. Under Kickl’s leadership, the FPÖ has been both a parliamentary and extra-parliamentary party. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it organized protests against COVID-19 countermeasures and the proposed vaccine mandate. Far-right groupuscules played a key role in Austria’s COVID-skeptic protest movement including neo-Nazis, identitarians, and the Reichsbürger movement, which does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German state.
Building the fortress: Kickl’s vision for Austria
The FPÖ’s recovery took off beginning around May 2022, a couple of months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had begun and its impact upon Europe, namely inflation, was beginning to be felt. In late November 2022, the war’s first winter when energy prices continent-wide were going through the roof, especially in Austria (a country until then dependent on Russian natural gas exports), the FPÖ took the lead in public polling, one it has held ever since.
September’s parliamentary election was, then, a fait accompli. Especially after the European elections in June, the FPÖ’s first win in a nationwide election, no outcome other than an FPÖ victory was foreseeable—the question was only its extent. In the end, the FPÖ won 28.8 percent of the vote, ahead of the ÖVP on 26.3 percent and SPÖ on 21.1 percent. The FPÖ succeeded in winning over some 443,000 people who voted for the ÖVP at the last elections in 2019 as well as 258,000 2019 non-voters. When asked why they voted for the FPÖ, 45 percent of FPÖ voters said it was the party’s policies that persuaded them, above all on immigration and the cost-of-living crisis.
For those foreigners for whom the FPÖ has no purpose, there exists the threat of ‘remigration.’ The far-right “envisages the return of all illegal immigrants”—however that may be defined—”via legal means”.
The FPÖ’s current policy agenda is a mixture of economic neoliberalism with interventionist elements, cultural conservatism, and hardline nationalism. “The party’s common goal is to stop the disintegration of our state and return to it full power of control over three essential elements: government, land, and people,” reads the opening of the party’s 2024 manifesto. “These three elements together constitute a fortress that will protect our beloved homeland, Austria, and grant each and every citizen the greatest possible freedom.”
Power that is currently held in common would, then, be centralized and wielded to overturn the liberal, postwar consensus and construct a more authoritarian, draconian, and isolationist state that privileging its citizens over other residents. To get there, Austria under the FPÖ would reevaluate all its international treaties and agreements and, within the EU, campaign to return areas of jurisdiction from Brussels to the states.
The party believes, per the manifesto of the pan-European far-right populist party Patriots.eu of which the FPÖ is a member, in a Europe “of strong, proud and independent nations…that refuse all further transfers of national sovereignty to the European institutions.” The FPÖ also wants to more firmly anchor Austria’s permanent neutrality in constitutional law and would have nothing to do either with a common European army or other pan-European defense arrangements like the European Sky Shield Initiative.
At home, parliamentary democracy would be undermined by instituting a system of greater direct democracy. “Direct democracy is the best way to rebuild trust in politics and push through measures blocked by the self-appointed elites,” the party’s manifesto reads. The street shouldn’t only be able to vote on new laws via referendums and ballot initiatives, the party believes. It should also have the right to pass a motion of no confidence in the government or individual ministers.
As citizens are handed more direct democratic power, the FPÖ would make it harder to become a citizen. Per the FPÖ’s manifesto: “If you want to benefit from the advantages of a community, you also have to contribute something. We are clearly against a legal right to citizenship. We want to be able to choose who we naturalize. And we also want to be able to treat our citizens better than immigrant foreigners”—an explicit call for the institutionalization of a caste system that places native-born people above foreign-born.
While the FPÖ claims it wants to attract ‘qualified workers’ to Austria, its manifesto pledges to revoke the right to family reunification for immigrants, block their right to cash benefits in favor of benefits-in-kind, reduce their access to public housing, and for asylum seekers specifically, grant them only the most basic level of public healthcare. On asylum, the FPÖ would like to reduce the number of asylum applications in Austria to zero, pledging to legalize ‘pushbacks’ on Austria’s borders and reject applications from asylum seekers who passed through safe third countries on their way to Austria.
For those foreigners for whom the FPÖ has no purpose, there exists the threat of ‘remigration.’ The far-right “envisages the return of all illegal immigrants”—however that may be defined—”via legal routes, securing our borders, reform of asylum, immigration, and citizenship laws, and the creation and promotion of voluntary return programs. A particular focus here is on Islamic parallel societies.” This what is means to build Fortress Austria.
The FPÖ’s immediate impact on relations with the Jewish community
The impact of the FPÖ’s victory in late September has been immediately felt. Foremost, it has already driven a wedge between the state and Austria’s Jewish community. In late October, Walter Rosenkranz was elected president of the Austrian parliament, a position equivalent to president of the National Assembly of France. The move was in-keeping with parliamentary custom that the president come from parliament’s largest party, but it put an alumnus of a greater German nationalist fraternity in one of the most powerful offices of state.
Rosenkranz’s fraternity, Libertas, has declared itself a ‘white’ fraternity and, in 1878, was the first greater German nationalist fraternity to ban Jews from becoming members. He has also previously praised the Nazi jurist Johann Karl Stich. As president of the Austrian parliament, Rosenkranz is now responsible for the National Fund for the Victims of National Socialism. Established in 1995, the Fund remains tasked with paying compensation to victims of National Socialism, caring for Austria’s Jewish cemeteries, and leading projects in the field of Holocaust remembrance.
“Granting the leadership of the National Fund to an FPÖ politician who has paid homage to Nazis in his writings mocks National Socialism’s victims and their descendants,” the JÖH’s president Alon Ishay said in condemning Rosenkranz’s candidature. Prior to the vote, Oskar Deutsch, president of president of the Jewish Community of Vienna (IKG), also wrote a letter to all parliamentary parties bar the FPÖ asking them whether a member of a greater German nationalist fraternity really deserves the responsibility of leading Austria’s parliament—to no avail.
At a meeting of the Jewish community’s council held November 4, members passed a resolution affirming that the IKG would have no contact with Rosenkranz, in line with previous resolutions forbidding cooperation with the FPÖ. Representatives of the IKG would only attend meetings of the National Fund for the Victims of National Socialism when presided over by Rosenkranz’s deputies, who come from the ÖVP and SPÖ respectively.
Rosenkranz’s fraternity, Libertas, has declared itself a ‘white’ fraternity and, in 1878, was the first greater German nationalist fraternity to ban Jews from becoming members.
This motion foreshadows the difficulties the IKG could face in working with an FPÖ-led government in future elections won by the party. Conduits from the ÖVP will have to installed in key ministries like the interior ministry, which is responsible for Austria’s police and security services. Leading figures from the ÖVP, however, like former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, president of the Austrian parliament Wolfgang Sobotka, and Europe and constitutional affairs minister Karoline Edtstadler—who led Austria’s previous work on antisemitism, Holocaust remembrance, and relations with Israel—are now out of national politics, complicating the picture further.
A FPÖ-ÖVP coalition was already setting the stage for further conflict between the government and the JÖH. Austria’s Union of Jewish Students successfully disrupted an attempt by Rosenkranz to lay a wreath at Vienna’s Holocaust Memorial on Judenplatz on November 8, the anniversary of Kristallnacht. The group also sought to bring abuse of office charges against Rosenkranz related to their previous moves against three FPÖ parliamentary candidates—now MPs—who, the JÖH suspected, may have violated Austria’s law prohibiting National Socialist activity.
In November, state prosecutors in Vienna requested Rosenkranz lift Martin Graf, Harald Stefan, and Norbert Nemeth’s parliamentary immunity. Rosenkranz proceeded to sit on that request for 10 days because, the JÖH believed, he did not want to undermine the FPÖ ahead of state elections in Styria on November 24. Said Ishay, “Nothing [Rosenkranz does] seems to be done impartially or in a non-partisan manner. Pro-democratic forces in parliament now must ask themselves whether having Rosenkranz, a member of a greater German nationalist fraternity, as the second highest official in the land is acceptable.”, facing the possibility of such an alliance.
The way to a Third Republic
Parliamentary democracy and decision making via consensus were and are the bedrocks of Austria’s postwar Second Republic. In the 1990s, Herbert Kickl’s “idol,” Jörg Haider, first proposed the concept of a Third Republic: a system that would weaken parliament’s authority via a more presidential system and the institutionalization of direct democracy. Haider also sought to do away with the social partnership through which laws and collective bargaining agreements are negotiated with or between representatives of labor and industry.
Haider’s ability to institute a Third Republic, and by extension Kickl’s to govern as a self-styled Volkskanzler, was and is always going to be constrained by Austria’s constitution and political realities. Unlike Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the FPÖ cannot govern alone, requiring the support of another party to form a government. Amending the constitution, meanwhile, requires a two-thirds majority in parliament. Austria’s constitutional court, EU membership, and international obligations including to the European Convention on Human Rights also place limits on the FPÖ’s room for maneuver.
Still, an FPÖ chancellor would have had very serious consequences for Austria’s democracy, institutions, and international standing. With his vision of a ‘Europe of the nations and regions,’ Austria under Kickl would have become part of a populist and Euroskeptic central European axis with Hungary, Slovakia, and perhaps also the Czech Republic (depending on the outcome of legislative elections there in October) that would use its leverage including its veto powers to undermine the work of the EU from within. This would include the EU’s Ukraine policy to which the FPÖ is opposed and its ability to provide oversight of democratic backsliding in member states.
Hungary and Poland under the rule of the Law and Justice Party provide a foretaste of what may be to come in Austria particularly in regard to press freedom. Austria is already a country, per the think tank Freedom House, in which “libel and slander laws protect politicians and government officials, many of whom—particularly members of the FPÖ—have filed defamation suits in recent years” and “media ownership remains highly concentrated, particularly in the provinces, and the government exerts considerable influence on the state broadcaster, the ORF.”
In power, the FPÖ would likely target the ORF. The party has pledged to do away with the license fee that funds the ORF and helps maintain its editorial independence even considering, also via Freedom House, that in October 2023, Austria’s constitutional court “found that the rules for appointing members to ORF’s two main control bodies were partially unconstitutional, giving the federal government too much influence over the bodies’ compositions. The ruling requires the government to reform the appointment process by March 2025.” The FPÖ could have used that opportunity to cut the ORF’s funding, reduce its output, and restructure the board of trustees.
The ORF would not have been the only public body over which an FPÖ-led government could have exerted influence via political appointments. At least one spot for a judge on the constitutional court is due to become available at the end of this year. Appointments will also need to be made this year to the financial markets authority, and the chief of the general staff is due to retire in 2026. Ministries that have abolished the position of general secretary, a party political appointment in the civil service, could have also seen that decision overturned, Falter has reported.
“There can be no illusions. Kickl as chancellor would be a turning point for Austria,” the Hungarian-born Austrian Jewish journalist Paul Lendvai has written. Austria would become “a fortress dominated by far-right politicians with a core of German nationalist fraternity alumni will join Orbán and [Slovakian prime minister Robert] Fico’s club of wreckers in the EU.” The FPÖ’s ultimate aim, Lendvai writes: to “abolish the hated ‘system’: liberal democracy.” What Kickl and the FPÖ in power would want to do is no secret. The only question is whether they will be allowed to succeed.
Understanding the failure of the ÖVP/FPÖ negotiations
Coalition negotiations between the FPÖ and ÖVP ended without agreement on February 12. The disagreement between the parties took place on three levels.
- First, at the surface level, they couldn’t agree on how to divide governmental portfolios between them. The FPÖ wanted the interior and finance ministries as well as the media, culture, and Europe portfolios, a division of power that would have given the far-right control over the police, security services, immigration authorities, tax authorities, media subsidies, and culture subsidies: almost the whole of the state.
- Second, beneath that, FPÖ and ÖVP couldn’t agree over policy, in particular Europe and foreign policy as well as constitutional, justice, and media reform. To take foreign policy as one example, the FPÖ wanted to: review Austria’s participation in sanctions against Russia, obstruct EU accession talks with Ukraine and the western Balkans, renegotiate the EU’s migration pact, undermine international courts’ jurisdiction over Austria, reevaluate Austria’s signature to international agreements, step away from the WHO’s treaty on pandemic prevention, eliminate the right to asylum in the EU in practice, and renege on Austria’s historical responsibility towards Israel.
- Third, and at the core of the matter, was a disagreement over fundamental rights and values, for the policy differences between the two parties, whether on Austria’s constitution, justice system, Europe and foreign policy, and membership of the rules-based international order, in fact spoke to inalienable rights like freedom of speech, assembly, and of the press.
In the end, these disagreements called into question the very nature of the Second Republic itself.
As to who is responsible for the FPÖ and ÖVP’s failure to form a government : Kickl himself. He was a first-hand witness to the compromises the FPÖ made in 2000 and 2017 to gain power and the toll being in coalition had on the party. Kickl believes the FPÖ should only enter government if it is in a position to institute its policies, which would transform Austria into a Third Republic. In other words: Kickl wants to govern absolutely—or not at all.His maximalist negotiating style was, then, an attempt to learn from the mistakes of the past, as Kickl would see it, but in doing so, he made new mistakes. He believed the polls represented political reality, making demands as if they were the 35 percent party the polls indicate they could be and not the 29 percent party they are per September’s election. He was, in the course of negotiations, an aloof, disinterested, and inscrutable negotiator who did not work on burnishing relations with the ÖVP and Stocker. He only sat down for seven hours of negotiations with the ÖVP. He underestimated the ÖVP’s power and resolve, and overestimated that the threat of new elections would force the ÖVP to toe the FPÖ’s line.
Deliberately or otherwise—because one also has to consider the underlying political conditions, meaning that the new Austrian government is going to have to make difficult and unpopular budget cuts over the next two years—it is hard not to conclude Kickl alone blew his best chance at the chancellorship.
