Last Thursday, on a cool Vienna night, anti-fascist protesters thronged through the pretty boulevards of Austria’s capital. The far right – in the shape of the Freedom party (FPÖ), led by bespectacled ideologue Herbert Kickl – had secured first place in September’s elections, unprecedented in postwar Austria. The protesters waved placards with slogans like “FPÖ ist so 1938”, referring to the year of Adolf Hitler’s Anschluss annexation, and chanted “Nazis raus!” (“Nazis out!”). They were boisterous and determined, but without a clear strategy to drive back the rightwing authoritarian surge that threatens to rot western democracies from within.
What is happening in Austria should alarm you, because it reflects a wider trend. It’s certainly true that the FPÖ is different from other far-right parties because it can directly trace its roots to Europe’s fascist past: its first leader in the 1950s was a former Nazi functionary, and its leader in the 1990s – Jörg Haider – praised Nazi employment policies and lauded former Waffen-SS members as “decent men”. When the conservative Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) brought him into coalition in 2000, this breaching of the cordon sanitaire, which was supposed to separate the centre right and what lies beyond, led to EU sanctions and mass protests at home and abroad.
But the FPÖ, and the world, has changed since the days of Haider. The party has exploited the conspiratorial backlash against Covid public health measures and vaccines. Its manifesto title – Fortress Austria – reflects policy demands to deport “uninvited foreigners”, suspend the right to asylum with an emergency law, and to strip migrants of rights and provisions. It embraces full-throated transphobia and demands a ban on “political Islam”. It urges an end to sanctions against Russia, and is widely accused of having links to Vladimir Putin’s regime. Indeed, in 2019, the party survived what some believed was an existential crisis in the form of “Ibizagate”, when then vice-chancellor and FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, was forced from office after a covertly filmed video from 2017 revealed him apparently offering state contracts to a person claiming to be a Russian investor.
The FPÖ’s chief inspiration is now Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian regime in neighbouring Hungary. What happened there was instructive. The ruling Fidesz party supposedly hailed from the centre right, then radicalised in power to forge what Orbán describes as an “illiberal democracy”, waging war on civil society, manipulating the electoral system and rigging the media in its favour.
Last week, I walked through Vienna with Maria Mayrhofer, the founding executive director of the digital grassroots movement #aufstehn, which focused on mobilising non-voters against the far right. Austria’s dark history loomed over us, literally, as we walked past the balcony of the Hofburg, where Hitler pronounced Anschluss to the assembled crowds 86 years ago. “I think Kickl is more radicalised in his positions than Orbán,” she told me ominously. If the FPÖ takes power, she feared, Austria is on “a classic authoritarian pathway. You look at Hungary – that’s where we’re going right now.”
The political scientist Natascha Strobl fears the same: in some ways, she already lives in an authoritarian world. Subjected to relentless death threats for writing about the far right, she has to constantly guard her security. In an Austrian cafe, bustling with politicians and researchers from the nearby parliament, she recalls meeting opposition Hungarian politicians, “and they’re just sitting there completely defeated, and saying ‘there’s nothing we can do’.”
Even the leader of the ÖVP, the mainstream conservative party, Karl Nehammer, rules out forging a coalition with Kickl, describing him as a “security threat”. But he has suggested a pact with the FPÖ that bypasses Kickl.
The far right is in the ascendancy in Austria as it is beyond its borders: from Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany to National Rally in France, or indeed the Trumpified Republicans in the US.
There are obvious reasons why. Since the 2008 financial crash, social provision and living standards have come under attack across the west to varying degrees. Traditional social democratic parties were complicit, and far-right parties eagerly raided their traditional bases, presenting immigration as the catch-all explanation for growing social and economic insecurity. Other crises, such as the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have deepened social turmoil: absolute poverty in Austria, for example, jumped by 50% last year.
But, as elsewhere, mainstream parties decided to adopt anti-migrant rhetoric and policies, believing this would defuse the far-right threat. On the contrary, it ensured the political conversation was fixed on exactly the terrain that the far right desired, simply legitimising it further as a political force.
Talk of the “decline of the west” has long been a fixture of the far right, which variously blames immigration, Islam, multiculturalism, the assault on “traditional values”, and the reckoning with historical injustices, which they believe defame the west. The truth, however, is the far-right surge is both a symptom and cause of western decline. The rolling back of social rights, economic stagnation, the convenient scapegoating of migrants by politicians keen to deflect responsibility, the mediocrity of the current crop of western leaders: here is a toxic brew.
Ever since the Hitlerites were toppled in Vienna, citizens of the west have taken democratic freedoms for granted. Well, I encountered growing pessimism about that in the Austrian capital, and it is widely shared in other western citadels. Even if Donald Trump is kept at bay across the Atlantic, a far right that increasingly rejects democratic norms is not going away. The warnings of the past, it appears, no longer shield us from a frightening future.
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Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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