Austria
prepares for historic swerve to the right
By ANTHONY MILLS
VIENNA, 20. MAY,
09:20
If pistol-packing
presidential candidate Norbert Hofer triumphs in the run-off of the
presidential election on Sunday (22 May) he will become the first
democratically elected far-right head of state in Western Europe
since the Second World War.
Despite the shudders
such a spectre prompts for many in Austria and throughout the
European Union, Hofer, a member of the populist Freedom Party (FPO)
and a fierce critic of Austria’s refugee policy, is the odds-on
favourite heading into the showdown against avuncular economics
professor and former Green Party chairman Alexander Van der Bellen.
Green candidate
Alexander Van der Bellen will try to prevent Hofer from being elected
(Photo: Van der Bellen's campaign)
In the first round
on 24 April, Hofer garnered 35 percent, Van der Bellen 21.
The elderly,
traditional candidates for the two ruling mainstream political
parties, the centre-left Social-Democratic Party (SPO) and
centre-right People’s Party (OVP), which had dominated Austrian
politics since the 1950s, barely managed between them to scrape
together two-thirds of Hofer’s tally.
Their poor
performance starkly illustrated how rapidly and deeply Austria’s
political landscape has changed.
The mood had already
begun to sour in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis amid an
initially creeping belief that the two old-school political parties
were responsible for economic stagnation underscored by a rising
unemployment rate, financial malaise, and an erosion of Austria’s
traditionally high quality of life.
SPO and OVP only
just managed to pass the joint simple majority mark in 2013 national
elections.
Near-constant
bickering between the two ruling coalition partners fuelled the
irritation. The far-right Freedom Party began edging up in the polls.
Then came the
refugees last year, in their hundreds of thousands, along the Balkan
route, through Austria.
Most of them
continued on to Germany, helped by the Austrian Federal Railways –
run, until a couple of weeks ago, by Austria’s brand-new chancellor
Christian Kern, who was appointed leader on 18 May after Werner
Faymann abruptly resigned amid the political turmoil unleashed by
round one of the presidential vote.
But 90,000 people
opted to apply for asylum in Austria, whose population is just 8.5
million.
The Freedom Party
pounced, warning in apocalyptic terms of chaos, the disintegration of
the Austrian state and the drowning of its cultural and religious
identity under a huge wave of foreign arrivals.
Values, law and
order
A swing to the
political right by the ruling Social Democrats and an uneasy
EU-Turkey deal to stem the flow of migrants failed to undo the damage
caused by the storm.
Freedom Party
support soared, whipped up by the carefully-crafted populist rhetoric
of its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache and compounded by a tabloid
press seething with stories about exploding crime linked to
foreigners.
If a parliamentary
election were held tomorrow, the Freedom Party would in all
likelihood win. Polls have it in pole position nationally, at well
over 30 percent.
Into the maelstrom
jumped presidential candidate Hofer, until now a deputy president of
the Austrian parliament, but whose cherubic demeanour and measured
rhetoric belie his unshakeable far-right field beliefs, as expressed
in his anti-immigration emphasis on Austrian values, law and order
and EU scepticism.
“You will be
surprised at all the things that will be possible" when I am
president, Hofer said in a recent TV debate.
One of the things he
could do, under constitutional powers never used by previous
presidents, is make good on his threat to dismiss the government if
he believes it is not acting in Austria’s interest.
That would spark
early elections that would almost certainly be won by the Freedom
Party, which could then partner with one of the battered mainstream
parties to rule the country.
From there, critics
warn, it would be but a small step towards the kind of democratic
erosion apparent in Hungary and Poland.
Alarm bells
Even if the current
coalition completes its mandate, Hofer would still be president after
national elections in 2018, and if, as expected, the Freedom Party
were to win then too, the party’s near-total hold on power - though
delayed - would still materialise.
While a Hofer
victory is not certain, alarm bells are already ringing at home and
abroad
Hans Rauscher, a
columnist at the Der Standard newspaper, has described the danger of
a “presidential putsch” and the “Orbanisation” of Austria by
reference to Hungary's right-wing leader Viktor Orban.
Vienna’s powerful
social-democratic mayor Michael Haeupl accused Hofer of “bluntly
marching in the direction of presidential dictatorship”.
“There exists the
possibility that the country could fundamentally and dramatically
change," Josef Kalina, a former SPO MP who still provides the
party with PR advice, told EUobserver. "That is the danger when
you elect as president someone from a very pronounced right-wing
populist protest party.”
“That would be
comparable to a takeover by Marine Le Pen and the Front National as
president in France … [or] Geert Wilders as the head of a
government with a parliamentary majority in the Netherlands,”
Kalina said of the consequences of a far-right president-chancellor
combination.
No Hungary or
Poland?
Freedom Party
spokesperson Martin Glier said that any suggestion Hofer would be an
authoritarian president was “nonsense”.
“He will be a
president for Austrians, not just of Austria, who will defend the
interests of Austrians vis a vis a government that has not done so
for a long time,” he told EUobserver.
But he added that
this would be in the form of a “control function that until now has
not been known like that”. As for Hofer’s approach to the EU? It
should re-adopt the “values of a Charles de Gaulle”, and move
away from any vision of a “Brussels central state”.
Asked if a future
Freedom Party chancellor emerging from national elections might,
together with a far-right president, threaten Austrian democracy
Glier said: “Not at all.” Would it create another Hungary or
Poland? “Not at all”.
But that does not
that mean Austrians and the EU have nothing to worry about if Hofer
becomes president, Glier said.
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