Graffiti, like any commodity, is not distributed equally and in Vienna, the election posters of the far-right Freedom Party—the FPhave had a near-monopoly. During the election campaign, it became increasingly difficult to find an unblemished picture of the party’s new leader, Norbert Hofer, or his parliamentary leader, Herbert Kickl.
Their posters’ tattered edges showed scraps of Hofer’s spiffy suits, checked ties and pocket squares, and cheery smile. Beneath inked-on moustaches or devil horns, Kickl wore the modern politician’s uniform: open-necked white shirt, steel-rimmed glasses and designer stubble. The two men are often described by journalists as good cop and bad cop: Hofer, affable and even-tempered, Kickl, the hard-line polemicist.
Now that the results are in, and the FPs share of the vote has plummeted, the posters have a new bathos. Even outside the metropolitan capital, in the party’s traditional homelands in the rural south, the FPÖ saw dramatic losses. Two days ago, Hofer was being described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, whose rebranding of the party would open a new direction for the European right. Now, rumours are circulating that the party will split, with a breakaway faction under the former leader Heinz-Christian Strache, and Hofer’s resignation is being widely discussed.
The Austrian media is consumed in a fervent guessing game about whom Sebastian Kurz, the former chancellor and leader of the winning ÖVP, will choose as a coalition partner. Few are still betting on the FPÖ. It was only in May that Kurz’s government was brought down by the scandalous ‘Ibiza affair’, in which he first threw the FPÖ out of office and then lost a vote of no confidence. It is a risk Kurz now seems unlikely to take twice.
The only less likely option is a partnership with the second-placed SPÖ, after a rancorous election campaign and the party’s disastrous results. The decision would be unpopular with voters tired of the country’s long history of grand coalitions. Most predict that Kurz will try either to rule as a minority single-party government or to govern with the Greens, the other major winner. To do so would be a remarkable departure in Austria’s political history.
The place of the right
But in either case, the election is far from the death knell for the Austrian, let alone the European, far right. The party’s numbers might have plunged since the last election in 2017 but the results were only a few points lower than polls had predicted and higher than in almost every other election since the millennium. More importantly, however, Anglophone journalists tend to overlook the party’s deep roots in Austria’s political mainstream.Hofer’s unexpected victory in the first round of Austria’s presidential elections in April 2016 and his narrow defeat in the runoff in December that year, bookending the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory, thrust Austrian politics into an international spotlight. His success was exceptional but not, in fact, unprecedented. The modern FPÖ had formed its first government twenty years ago with the ÖVP. Just a few months after the 2016 loss, it formed its second. Even then, the FPs popularity was still only approaching that of the late 1990s, under then-leader Jörg Haider.
Haider appears more than ever the ghost at the feast of Austria’s—and Europe’s—politics. From the late-1980s, he developed a brash form of right-wing populism that rested as much on his personality as his politics. He opposed immigration and refugees, agitated against the country’s political elite and its “left-wing” media, and was accused repeatedly of anti-Semitism and of relativizing Austria’s Nazi past.
At his death in 2008, Haider’s obituarists tended to describe him as flashy but ineffectual, a self-publicist with little real political weight—and, indeed, he never held national public office. But, since his death, the political compound and aesthetic that Haider pioneered has begun to appear extraordinarily prescient, the format for a host of ostentatious millionaires who have upset mainstream politics from its fringes.
Indeed, the FPs achievements have often been from outside government, pushing the centre-ground of Austrian politics to the right. The party regularly taunts Kurz for having stolen their policy proposals—an accusation that had an additional twist during this election campaign.
Speaking whose language?
When Kurz unveiled his election ads at the end of August, they included a nudge-nudge slogan that had already been used by the FPÖ: “someone who speaks our language.” Both sides began trading claim and counter-claim about who stole from whom. For Kurz, often accused of bringing the far right’s talking points into the mainstream, the duplication was more than a little awkward. Satirists wrote that he was, indeed, speaking the FPs language.But there was another twist to come. The FPÖ pointed out that the slogan had last appeared in Haider’s 1999 election posters. In them, Haider is caught mid-laugh, his brilliant white teeth flashing over his open-necked shirt, an Austrian folk jacket around his shoulders. Twitter users paired the image with Kurz’s ads, his smiling face and open-necked shirt, his slogans of trust and common sense.
What Kurz and the FPÖ do next will reveal much about the realm of the possible in Europe’s future. The FPs latest poster read, “without us, Kurz will tip to the left.” Whether they are correct remains to be seen.
