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“No games, no tricks, no sabotage.” Herbert Kickl appeared to be embarking on a rewarding negotiation rather than coalition talks last week after receiving approval from Austria’s president to attempt to form a government three months after winning parliamentary elections.
The far-right leader clearly has the whip hand in negotiations with the centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP), whose coalition efforts failed earlier this month. Any ruckus, Kickl threatened, would lead to a new vote and, polls suggest, a landslide victory for his Freedom Party (FPÖ) over the conservatives.
Kickl won’t have it all his way. The ÖVP insists that he accept safeguards to protect press freedom, maintain a constructive relationship with the EU and continue support for Ukraine. But the center right isn’t showing much backbone. Christian Stocker, the new head of the ÖVP, last autumn described Kickl’s FPÖ as “not only a threat to democracy, but an equally great threat to Austria’s security”. A few months later, there is no such concern.
Austria is on track for its first far-right chancellor since World War II. It would be a logical development for the country, where Kickl’s party has already participated in three center-right federal governments, though never at the top. But it would still be a historic breakthrough for the FPÖ, with reverberations beyond Austria.
This would normalize and encourage other populist nationalist movements in Europe. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has often taken its ideological cues from its more staunch Austrian counterpart. Alice Weidel, the AfD’s candidate for chancellor, has recently embraced the concept of “emigration” — the mass deportation of immigrants deemed to have failed to integrate, regardless of their citizenship status. The idea was first championed by the Austrian nativist ideologue Martin Sellner, picked up by Kickl and his party, and then adopted by the extremist wing of the AfD. When it emerged that a group of AfD politicians and activists had attended a meeting with Sellner in November 2023 to discuss “immigration”, Weidel effectively denied them. Now she has made it her policy.
Kickl would bolster the growing cadre of nationalist, Eurosceptic leaders in Central Europe who, orchestrated by Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, appear determined to challenge the EU’s liberal establishment and its pro-Ukrainian foreign policy. They could be joined by Andrej Babiš, the billionaire on track to win parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic later this year. Nationalist Călin Georgescu could be elected Romania’s president in a rerun after his bid was annulled in December by the country’s constitutional court over what Romanian authorities claimed was a Russian-backed influence campaign. Mitteleuropa’s troublemakers may not always act in unison, but they are becoming impossible to overlook, let alone ignore.
Kickl’s possible rise to power also underscores the fragility of the political center in Europe in early 2025. Mainstream parties unwilling to cooperate with the far right or the populist right are struggling to find common ground among themselves to govern in effective way. Strained public finances only compound the problem.
In Austria, Kickl was invited to form a government because the center-right could not agree with the center-left and liberals on how to reduce the vexed public deficit. In France, the new minority government of François Bayrou is hanging by a thread, waiting for a budget deal. Fundamental differences over debt rules first paralyzed and then imploded Germany’s “traffic light” coalition, propelling the AfD to new heights.
Germany’s main parties’ firewall against far-right power-sharing remains intact – for now. But their ability to work together in the office will be severely tested. The Christian Democrats, who have moved significantly to the right under Friedrich Merz, are set to win, but will have to join either the Social Democrats or the Greens, and possibly both, to form a coalition. However, some of Merz’s allies are keen to insult the Greens.
“Austria is an example of how things should not go,” said Greens chancellor candidate Robert Habeck. “If the parties of the center are not able to create alliances and reject compromises as the work of the devil, it helps the radicals.
“If we do not show willingness to create democratic alliances, we face instability and inability to act. Germany cannot afford this and we cannot expect Europe to accept it.”
Habeck is right. Compromise has become a dirty word in European politics. One that will surely never pass Herbert Kickl’s lips.
ben.hall@ft.com
