The historic victory in Austria of the Freedom Party, the FPO, is causing considerable concern at a national but also international level. In the recent elections, the far-right party led by Herbert Kickl gained around 2.5 percentage points ahead of current Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative People’s Party (OVP), winning around 29 percent of the vote, its best result in Always.
The popular people’s dilemma
Kickl, a controversial figure close to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has offered to negotiate with all the other parties in Austria to form a government, but other political forces may not want to come to terms with him. The OVP made it clear that it would also be ready to discuss, but Nehammer ruled out being able to support Kickl as chancellor.
In Austria the far right triumphs (but the government remains distant)
“I believe that in Austria we need a popularly led form of government that excludes the Freedom Party. Political battles are always won at the center to prevent extremists of the right and left from doing damage. Any neo-Nazi resurgence must be rejected”, declared Antonio Tajani, Foreign Minister and leader of Forza Italia, a party allied with the OVP.
Cumbersome past
Kickl’s FPO is considered problematic not only for its pro-Russian positions, for its radical proposals against migrants, but the party and several of its members are accused of neo-Nazi sympathies. The Freedom Party was founded in 1955. Its first leader, Anton Reinthaller, was a former brigadier general of the SS. He was born from the “third camp” of Austrian politics, which brought together liberal nationalist and German nationalist tendencies.
Over the years, the FPO has worked to moderate its image, but has not been able to completely free itself from the shadows, and the behavior of its exponents has certainly not helped. Kickl himself says he wants to become the next Volkskanzler, or ‘people’s chancellor’, borrowing a term also used in Nazi propaganda to describe Adolf Hitler.
The present as well
The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported that last Friday at the funeral of a former party politician, Walter Sucher, who had died two days earlier at the age of 90, several participants sang an SS song. Several senior figures were also present at the event. party officials. Other political forces condemned the incident and the Austrian Jewish Students’ Union announced that it had filed a complaint against the FPO politicians who were present at the funeral. President of the Austrian Jewish Student Union Alon Ishay told Der Standard that this fact is a “warning signal for Austria”.
“Those who have forgotten why the FPO can be defined as the party of ‘basement Nazis’ are reminded by the FPO candidates who sing SS songs”, accused the president of the Jewish Community of Vienna, Oskar Deutch. Kickl himself in 2010 had downplayed the severity of the SS’s activities during the Holocaust. The leader, then general secretary of the FPO, told the then president of the Jewish community Ariel Muzicant that a generalized condemnation of the members of the Waffen-SS would be “senseless”, Der Standard further recalled.
The attempted opening with Israel
Vienna’s 10,000-strong Jewish community maintains a policy of non-cooperation with the Freedom Party, as does Israel’s Foreign Ministry. But in the past the party has tried to create ties with Tel Aviv’s right, an attempt that has exacerbated the conflict between the party and the local Jewish community, which has sought to hinder any normalization process.
“Andreas Mölzer, a former leading thinker of the Freedom Party, openly said words like: ‘If we can receive a kosher certificate from Israel, then no one in Austria or Europe will be able to deny our participation in government,'” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz Andreas Peham, scholar of the Documentation Center of the Austrian Resistance in Vienna, expert on right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism.
“This was a purely strategic choice, which was not actually linked to any kind of real change within the party regarding anti-Semitism,” the researcher added. Although anti-Semitic incidents have decreased in recent years, Peham believes that the Freedom Party “remains, at its historical-programmatic core, an anti-Semitic party. For the far right, Israel represents the image of the ‘good Jew’, of the Jew muscular, while ‘globalists’, ‘multiculturalists’ and George Soros remain part of the anti-Semitic discourse.”
The FPO in his opinion is unable to free itself from anti-Semitism due to its historical and contemporary ties to “German nationalism and the idea of a German ethnic community. There is no ideology that affirms a German ethnic community without antisemitism exists.”
The League downplays it
The League, which together with the FPO sits in the European Parliament on the Patriots for Europe benches, downplays the accusations. “When the establishment forces are soundly rejected at the polls, they start to see fascists and Nazis everywhere. It happened in France, Germany, Holland and now also in Austria”, declared the head of the Northern League delegation in Brussels Paolo Borchia. For the Northern League member it is “politically unacceptable, a few hours after the commemoration of the Marzabotto massacre, to talk about fascism and Nazism, instrumentally using horrors that belong to the past to attack opponents; it is a practice that belongs to the left without arguments”. “And it is the voters who decide in Austria, not Tajani”, he concluded.
