Ignore Austrian politics at your peril.
Just when it looked like it was safe to mute Austrian news headlines again, the country’s leaders delivered a bombshell over the weekend resonating far beyond the Alps.
Long story short: the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ/PfE), one of the most potent anti-immigrant, pro-Russian parties in Europe, is on the cusp of taking power after efforts to build a three-way centrist coalition imploded.
One might be inclined to dismiss the news as just another Austrian eccentricity. That would be a mistake. Austria has long been the canary in Europe’s coal mine.
In the 1990s, for example, the country was the cradle for a new form of slick, right-wing populism fueled by a toxic mix of anti-foreigner, nationalist rhetoric that has since taken hold from Athens to Aarhus.
More recently, the Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by a group of politically homeless SS veterans and Nazis, served as the template for the far-right iteration of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD/ESN).
That is why the rest of Europe should pay very close attention to what just happened in Austria: the key shift had nothing to do with the Freedom Party itself but with the centre-right bedrock of the establishment, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP/EPP).
For years, ÖVP leaders swore up and down that they would never accept a coalition controlled by Herbert Kickl, the Freedom Party’s extremist frontman – until Sunday.
