Refugee
crisis could deliver Vienna to the right
Support
for far-right party leader Heinz-Christian Strache is growing ahead
of Sunday’s elections.
By EDWARD STEEN
10/9/15, 6:52 PM CET
VIENNA — Just how
scary is Heinz-Christian Strache, the ever-smiling former dental
technician, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), and
all-purpose bogeyman of Austria’s liberal-left?
Very, it turns out —
according to 150,000 people who turned out for a charity concert on
Vienna’s symbolic Heldenplatz — site of Hitler’s famous
Anschluss speech — a week ahead of the mayoral elections on October
11. “In with the refugees, out with the FPÖ,” they chanted, and
“No walls around Europe.”
Even Federal
President Heinz Fischer joined in, making a stirring speech, for
which he was fêted like a rock star.
* * *
Such displays have
become a tradition here. The FPÖ rose to prominence in the mid-1990s
under the demagogic Jörg Haider, killed in a spectacular car
accident in 2008.
Despite its attempts
to eat into the traditional bourgeois vote and to become a party
people would pretend not to have voted for, a large part of its
constituency has always been what Austrians call brauner Sumpf, the
brown sludge of xenophobia and extremist views.
In 2000 Haider’s
share of the vote was enough, around a quarter, to force a
center-right ruling coalition. It triggered a political crisis in
Europe, with other EU states imposing sanctions on Vienna.
Since then, Haider’s
charismatic brand of right-wing populism has become a fixture in many
of the same countries that back then reacted with shock and horror,
from France to Sweden.
An
FPÖ victory in Vienna would send a signal to the world that Austria,
despite the outpouring of charity towards refugees in recent months,
hasn’t really changed since the days of Haider.
The question, come
Sunday, is whether the opposition on display at Heldenplatz is potent
enough to keep Strache out of city hall. Austria’s Social Democrats
(SPÖ) have won every free election in the city since 1919, building
a deep working-class base with decades of clientelism. But the days
of jobs and housing for life are long gone.
At first glance,
there’s nothing particularly surprising about the FPÖ’s recent
surge. The party, which styles itself as the party of the “little
guy,” has been making steady inroads into the SPÖ base for years,
attacking the incumbent’s foreigner-friendly policies and
capitalizing on a perception that the city’s quality of life, often
rated the best in the world, is on the decline. Many traditional SPÖ
supporters have defected to the FPÖ.
Indeed, the FPÖ has
been the second-largest party in the city for most of the past 25
years. In 1996, during Haider’s heyday, the FPÖ won 28 percent of
the vote, compared to 39 percent for the SPÖ.
What’s different
this time around is the refugee crisis. An FPÖ victory in Vienna
would send a signal to the world that Austria, despite the outpouring
of charity towards refugees in recent months, hasn’t really changed
since the days of Haider. That prospect has galvanized the country’s
elites — a coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and liberals —
into trying to keep the FPÖ at bay.
* * *
Before the refugee
exodus began, Strache’s prospects of becoming mayor were remote,
despite helpfully pervasive Euroskepticism, the usual fed-upness with
traditional parties, Vienna’s relatively high unemployment,
stagnant wages, and the growing shortage of affordable housing.
Now Strache is on a
roll, apparently neck and neck in the polls with Michael Häupl, the
66-year-old incumbent Socialist strongman and kingmaker: An OGM poll
gives 38 percent for Häupl to Strache’s 34 percent, with a 3.4
percent margin of error. However, one veteran analyst suspects
manipulation to scare anti-Strache voters into turning out at the
polls.“The internal Socialist [SPÖ] polls show a growing lead in
favor of Häupl,” he said.
The son of a refugee
from Bohemian Sudetenland, Strache — or “HC,” as he likes to
call himself — said in an unguarded television interview that,
according to a numerologist and self-described magician named Tina
Puchinger whom he consults (and for whose insights the party has
reportedly paid €6,000) the date of the Vienna election “is going
to be a really great day.”
Smaller parties,
including the conservative ÖVP, the junior partner in the federal
government, are nowhere close. “Watch out or you’ll soon be an
endangered species,” Strache said jokingly to his ÖVP rival during
the final television debate between candidates known as “the
Elephant Round”; polls suggest ÖVP support in Vienna could fall to
10 percent or even lower.
* * *
For
Socialist-dominated Red Vienna to become Blue (the FPÖ color), or a
Red-Blue coalition, would breach one of the deepest post-war taboos,
and risk reviving the kind of international exclusion the country
suffered in the 1990s, in the heyday of Haider, Strache’s notorious
predecessor. Vienna has been Red for as long as anyone can remember.
“Will Vienna be
the first democratic western metropolis with a right-wing party in
the majority?” asked Christian Rainer, publisher of the influential
Profil news magazine. “The chances are 50-50. That alone is a 100
percent catastrophe.”
All
far-right parties benefit from the darkening mood over the refugee
debacle, the sense that traditional politicians have lost control,
either at national or EU level.
But the FPÖ’s
advance is far from unique. It is one of a handful of resurgent
rightist, anti-European parties across the EU, from Strache’s ally
the National Front in France, now nudging 40 percent in the polls, to
the likes of Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, and Viktor Orbán, not to
forget Pegida, the fiercely anti-EU, anti-Islamist movement in
Germany.
Europe as a whole is
palpably shifting ever further to the right. The cleverer leaders are
keen to sound reasonable.
Crucially, all
far-right parties benefit from the darkening mood over the refugee
debacle, the sense that traditional politicians have lost control,
either at national or EU level, and have no real idea how many
millions more people are coming. The German government draws the line
at 800,000, the U.N. talks about 3 million, the terrible events
unfolding on television screens suggest an unguessable number.
The issue
overshadowed local elections in Upper Austria last month. Strache
doubled the FPÖ vote, calling for an end to Europe’s
“Islamification” and the restoration of national borders, and
arguing that most refugees are in fact economic migrants. And what
about terrorist sleeper cells? he asked.
In Burgenland, on
the Hungarian border, the party has been in coalition with the
Socialists for the last three months following regional elections.
Little real campaigning is needed except to fan existing anxieties.
“We want to keep
our culture,” Strache tells the flag-waving crowds in Vienna’s
poorest districts. “Others want to abolish it.”
* * *
A divorcee with two
children, and fond of partying, his fencing club, and trips to Ibiza
to maintain his tan, Strache is a constant, strident presence on
Facebook and other social media, where he is subject to much abuse,
frequently obscene.
But he can take it.
These days he is mostly affable and moderate-seeming, in the manner
of Marine Le Pen, even in the face of openly hostile treatment by
state-run television and radio. “Aggression can be a sign of
attraction,” he remarked genially to the Green candidate Maria
Vasilakou — Häupl’s deputy in Vienna’s Red-Green coalition —
when she interrupted him in the candidates’ television debate.
The
FPÖ’s provocative slogans — like “Daham statt Islam” (Home,
not Islam) — are primitive, but appeal to a large section of “new”
Austrians.
The FPÖ is
much-criticized for having no serious program for Vienna other than
to break up the Socialists’ “cozy friendships system” and has
no plan on how to run the country as a whole.
The party also
confronts the pull effect of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
announcement that “there’s still room,” and what Hungary’s
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has called “moral blackmail” as
Germany tries to convince other EU countries accept their share of
the refugee burden.
In multi-ethnic
Vienna, half the 1.8 million population has a “migration
background,” thanks to an influx of Hungarians, Czechs, Poles,
refugees from the Yugoslav wars, and a swathe of Pakistanis, Afghans
and especially Turks, who make up close to half the population in
some districts and have their own party, a branch of Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan’s AKP.
The FPÖ’s
provocative slogans — like “Daham statt Islam” (Home, not
Islam) — are primitive, but appeal to a large section of “new”
Austrians. In the last Vienna elections in 2010, 16 percent of such
voters supported the FPÖ; now there is even a Croatian FPÖ
candidate in the elections for the 23 Vienna district councils.
Far from putting out
a welcome mat for a huge influx of refugees, disquiet or frank
opposition is widespread among established immigrants from the
Balkans — among Serbs especially — Poland, and even Turkey.
Few, understandably,
are outspoken. But Aydin Tursun, a 28-year-old building foreman who
arrived in Austria from Turkey as a child, and is a practicing
Muslim, said he opposed the parallel societies and the loud
opposition to Christian values that has developed in working class
districts: “As an Austrian I would feel racist about that too.”
He has seen Islamic
State flags raised in street demonstrations: “We don’t need that
kind of thing in Austria. The other parties don’t talk about it.
The FPÖ does. That’s why I’ll vote for them.” Is he concerned
about the FPÖ’s extremist fringes? They’re a pity, he says. “But
the Left has those too.”
Edward Steen is a
Vienna-based freelance writer. He was founding central and eastern
Europe editor of the London Independent
Authors:
Edward Steen
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