‘Alarm for the Republic’ protest on 9 January in Austria (Photo: ©Murtaza Elham)
A fascist is due to become Austria’s chancellor. The Conservative People’s Party (OVP) promised it would never enter a coalition government with the far right Freedom Party (FPO) under their new leader Herbert Kickl. Now it is doing just this.
The OVP started coalition talks on Friday and even seem ready to crown Kickl as chancellor. Last year the FPO won the parliamentary elections for the first time with 29 percent of the vote. The OVP won just over 26 percent and the Labour type SPO got 21 percent.
Initially the conservatives entered coalition talks with the SPO and the neoliberal Neos. But Neos soon quit the talks and the conservatives followed the day after. Both blamed the social democrats for defending their positions too stubbornly.
The truth is that Austria faces an economic crisis, with a budget deficit that exceeds European Union spending rules. Both parties see the crisis as an opportunity to eliminate more of the remnants of the social achievements of the 20th century.
The conservatives want to push Austrian politics further to the right and sideline the left for decades—as has happened in Hungary. For this, they are willing to pay a price.
They will give up the opportunity to appoint one of their own as chancellor and play second fiddle in a coalition with Kickl as chancellor instead. And they are risking further conflicts with the European Union.
The FPO is unlikely to play along with the EU in the way that Italian leader Georgia Meloni does. Its role as an anti-EU party is one of the key ingredients for its success story.
The FPO is clearly a fascist party, founded as a successor to the Nazis by SS-war criminals and high ranking Nazi government members. It publicly maintains good relations with neo-Nazis and invites their representatives to parliament.
It has never really hidden its political traditions and orientation, but the Covid pandemic has conspicuously radicalised the party.
In November 2023, members of the German fascist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), held a secret meeting with representatives of the far right nationalist Austrian Identitarians in Potsdam, Germany. There they plotted to deport German citizens to the Muslim countries of origin of their ancestors.
The AfD went on the defensive. But Kickl confirmed these deportation plans in public interviews. The FPO also announced plans to set up an office where left-wing teachers can be reported and sanctioned, and a ban on the hijab and on gender-neutral spelling in public offices.
The first demonstration at the start of the coalition talks had up to 50,000 people. This is a good start. But the outcry is nowhere near as loud as in the year 2000 when the conservatives formed a coalition with the fascists for the first time. The left will have to put up serious resistance if it wants to prevent Kickl’s plans from being implemented.
Racism first developed as a justification for enslavement
