Austria: Rise of the neo-fascists

“Austria has lurched to the right,” said Michael Frank in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The two far-right parties—the Freedom Party and its spinoff, the Alliance for the Future of Austria—together got 29 percent of the vote in this week’s parliamentary elections. The results are an embarrassing slap to the two mainstream parties, the center-left Social Democrats and center-right People’s Party, which had been trying to govern together in a “grand coalition” that has been paralyzed by bickering since 2006. The two had their worst election outcomes since World War II, with 30 percent for the Social Democrats and 26 percent for the People’s Party.

The hatemongers are once again on the rise, said Ian Traynor in Britain’s The Guardian. The “neo-fascist right” did even better in this election than it did in 1999, when Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party took 27 percent of the vote and entered government. Europe was so appalled by the sight of neo-fascists in government that it isolated Austria diplomatically for years. Now Haider, a man who idolizes SS officers, is back, this time at the helm of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, which he split off from the Freedom Party. And the Freedom Party is back, too, now led by Heinz-Christian Strache, who hangs out with “neo-Nazi militants who deny the Holocaust” and blames all of Austria’s ills on Turkish immigrants. Strache’s main plan for Austria is the creation of a new ministry that would oversee the deportation of Turks and Africans.

It’s a mistake to think that Austrians are now suddenly all racists, said Christoph Kotanko in Austria’s Kurier. The surge in support for the two extremist parties should not be seen as an embrace of the far right, but rather as a protest vote against the two main parties. Those two “have themselves to blame” for losing the support of the average Austrian voter. Over the years, the mainstream parties “stopped being truly national parties” and became “beholden to the interests of big lobbyists.” Strache and Haider were able to exploit this discontent.

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There’s still a perfectly acceptable government to be made out of these results, said Hans Dichand in Austria’s Kronen Zeitung. Werner Faymann, head of the Social Democrats, the party with the largest share of votes, will become prime minister, and he is not likely to pick either Strache or Haider as a coalition partner. If, instead, he can select “those few good politicians” out of the People’s Party to join his Cabinet, he could make a decent grand coalition of the two main parties.

Such a coalition is probably what we’ll see, said Michael Fleischhacker in Austria’s Die Presse, but it will hardly bring stability. After all, that’s exactly the kind of government the voters just rejected so soundly. A decision by the political establishment that the best thing for the country is more of the same will produce “justifiable rage” that “will drive still more voters” to the far right.