Austrian far right set to win national election, in postwar first

BERLIN — Austria's anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPÖ) was on track Sunday night to win the Austrian parliamentary election in an unprecedented victory. If projections hold up, it would be the first national victory for the country's far right since World War II. But an FPÖ chancellor isn't a given: Other parties have ruled out building the necessary coalition to form a government under the FPÖ's provocative far-right leader, Herbert Kickl.

"Voters have exercised their authority," Kickl said Sunday night, adding that Austria needs to reconnect to the needs and interests of the population.

"Our hand is outstretched in all directions. I am ready for talks with everyone," Kickl said.

Projections provided by the Foresight Institute on behalf of Austrian public broadcaster ORF, with more than 97 percent of the vote counted, saw the FPÖ in first position with 28.8 percent. Center-right People's Party (ÖVP) followed with 26.3 percent, and its leader, incumbent Chancellor Karl Nehammer, conceded defeat. The center-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) looked set to finish third with 21.1 percent. Compared to the 2019 election, FPÖ was doing almost 13 percentage points better and ÖVP was 11 points worse.

Cengiz Günay, director of the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, said Sunday's result reinforces that European sentiments are shifting.

"The trend is clearly that these far-right populist parties are getting stronger and the center ground is getting weaker," Günay said. "This is a kind of new patriotism 'against the old elites up there, who did everything wrong and took away our freedoms.'"

Up for grabs in Sunday's election were 183 seats in the Nationalrat, Austria's lower house of parliament. Some 6.3 million Austrians were eligible to vote.

Despite the FPÖ's projected win, the party — which campaigned with its program "Fortress Austria, Fortress of Freedom" — will need to build a coalition to form a majority government. But other parties have said they will not build such a coalition led by Kickl.

Nehammer said this month that it is "impossible to form a government with someone who adores conspiracy theories" — but left the door open to the possibility of a coalition without Kickl at the helm.

"The FPÖ is a very heterogeneous party. Thank God. There are a lot of sensible people in the FPÖ," Nehammer said.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen is also not obliged to appoint the candidate from the party with the most seats as chancellor.

Kickl, a former interior minister under Austria's 2017-2019 government, took the reins of the FPÖ in June 2021. In the three years since, the divisive leader has shifted the party further to the right. Though he denies accusations that he draws on Nazi-era tropes, in the unlikely event that he's offered the top government job, Kickl doesn't want to become chancellor, but rather the "Volkskanzler" or "People's Chancellor" — a historically loaded term used by the Nazis for Adolf Hitler.

Distance between the FPÖ and far-right extremists like the Identitarian Movement also lessened under Kickl. The FPÖ leader suggested that Identitarians have been wrongly labeled as extremists, and compared the group to nonprofits like Greenpeace.

"If the Identitarians are championing a political project or initiative that we think is acceptable, then why should I not support it?" Kickl told ORF, the broadcaster, last year.

"Remigration" — a term increasingly used by the far and extreme right, including the Identitarians, alluding to the mass deportation of people to their family's country of origin — is a key pillar of party policy. The FPÖ also wants to block family reunification of migrants and slash provisions for asylum seekers and irregular migrants to the bare minimum. On foreign policy, the Kremlin-friendly FPÖ opposes more aid to Ukraine and rejects European Union sanctions against Russia.

The topics of immigration, domestic security and increased cost of living shaped election campaigning, with climate change also making a return following deadly flooding in August and September. Sunday's election did not bear out hopes in the conservative ÖVP that Nehammer's highly praised crisis management would provide a final boost for the party.

The task for the future is to "take a closer look and see why radicalized people get more votes than we, the force of the center-ground," Nehammer said Sunday as he conceded defeat. The aim is to solve problems and not to live off them, he said.

The FPÖ's victory comes as far-right parties across Europe continue to grow in strength in national, regional and European elections .

"This isn't just a European trend, but almost a transatlantic trend," Günay said. "The rhetoric about 'winning back the sovereignty of our country' and 'taking back control of our borders' isn't dissimilar to what we hear from former U.S. President Trump."

Should the FPÖ manage to lead a government, it would join several other far-right parties in power in the E.U., including in Hungary, Italy and the Netherlands.

In neighboring Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) also made historic gains in recent weeks, winning its first state election in the eastern state of Thuringia this month and finishing a strong second in the nearby states of Saxony and Brandenburg .

"Having the Freedom Party in government would certainly not be good for the European Union," said Reinhard Heinisch, a professor at the University of Salzburg.

"Their model is Viktor Orban and the Hungarian model. They're Euroskeptic; they're very much opposed to the sanctions against Russia. They see the Ukraine war as NATO-provoked and a project by European elites and so they portray the Austrians, due to the inflation and the high energy prices, as sort of victims of that war," Heinisch said.

"Kickl doesn't have the majority at this time to do so, but if the Freedom Party ends up in a strong position in government, it could certainly begin to erode some of the aspects of liberal democracy from within," he said.

Founded in 1956 and initially chaired by a former Nazi functionary and SS officer, the FPÖ is one of Europe's oldest existing far-right parties. Until the mid-1980s, the party often drifted between the extreme right and center until it firmly adopted a far-right, anti-elite and populist party platform in 1986.

Two coalitions between the ÖVP and FPÖ in 1999 and 2017 were short-lived. Infighting within the FPÖ in the early 2000s saw a swift end to the first coalition in 2002, while the 2019 "Ibiza-gate" scandal — which highlighted the close relationship between the FPÖ and Russia — caused that government to collapse after just 18 months.

If all other parties continue to refuse to cooperate with a Kickl-led FPÖ, the ÖVP, as potential kingmaker, could end up forming Austria's first three-party coalition with the Social Democrats and either the centrist NEOS or the Greens — the ÖVP's current junior coalition partner. The possibility of a two-party coalition between the ÖVP and the Social Democrats was too close to call on Sunday night.

Faced with a shrinking economy and growing pressure from other E.U. member states to diversify its energy supply and reduce dependence on Russian gas, Austria will have no easy ride during the coming legislative period, regardless of which parties form a coalition. The E.U. aims to phase out Russian gas by 2027, but Austria remains heavily reliant on Russia gas: In December, 98 percent of the country's gas came from Russia.

"Austria is in an economic crisis and this certainly contributed to the FPÖ winning and the existing government being punished," Günay said. "People feel that their money is worth less and there is no economic stimulus on the horizon that could change things for the better."