AP Photo/Ronald Zak
This Sunday, 6.4 million Austrian voters will cast their votes for a new president in an election that carries chilling echoes of the Nazi era, and that could have far reaching implications for European politics.
If parliamentary elections were held today, victory would go to the Freedom Party (FPÖ), a descendant of the old Austrian Nazi party and now the nation's most popular party. This Sunday's presidential election could deliver the region its first far-right head of state since World War II. The Austrian contest will also shed light on whether Donald Trump's victory in the U.S. and the triumph of Euroskeptics in Britain are adding momentum to the populist surge in the West. For the politically weakened Austrian (and European) left, the rise of the Freedom Party amid working-class voter anger should be a wake-up call.
The election pits Green Party candidate Alexander van der Bellen against Norbert Hofer, the Freedom Party standard bearer. This Sunday's balloting is a re-vote of a runoff contest that initially took place on May 22, and that was annulled by Austria's Constitutional Court because of voting irregularities. (These included the premature opening of mail-in ballots.) In that runoff, van der Bellen barely won, by a margin of only 31,000 votes.
As in the United States, Austria's voters are sharply divided between urban and rural regions. Van der Bellen's biggest backing seems to come from the socially liberal, well-educated voters in Vienna and Austria's eight other cities, particularly from women and young voters. Hofer, by contrast, has won over the vast majority of the nation's blue-collar workers (90 percent), and of small-town voters in rural Austria.
Whoever wins, Austria will for the first time have a president from outside the two main parties-the center-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the center-right People's Party (ÖVP)-that have dominated its politics for decades. The candidates of both mainstream parties were utterly defeated in the first round of balloting, garnering only 22 percent of the votes between them.
Europe has been watching closely. Political analysts are showing even more caution than they were before the American elections, having learned that it is hard to tell whether the economy, globalism, culture, race, or gender issues hold the key to the outcome. After Trump's surprise win, the European pundit class seems to have lost a great deal of self-confidence. It should come as no surprise that opinion pollsters in Austria are refusing to make predictions.
One puzzle is how Hofer and his Freedom Party's nationalistic and openly xenophobic rhetoric have won such popularity in Austria, which is the 12th richest country in the world, has one of the highest per capita income levels in the EU, and boasts a more-than-generous welfare system.
As John B. Judis explains in his short book, The Populist Explosion, such "populism amid prosperity" has turned up in even more-prosperous Denmark, which has the second-highest per capita income in the EU, and an unemployment rate of only 4.6 percent. How is this possible?
One key reason is that both the FPÖ in Austria and the People's Party in Denmark have undergone significant political "reorganizations" that downplay their allegiance to their extremist and xenophobic base, and rebrand themselves as parties of the "ordinary man" left behind by a corrupt system that caters to the elites. Both parties combine anti-immigrant rhetoric with strong support for the welfare state, which explains their increasing popularity with the working class.
In last year's national elections, FPÖ for the first time received more working-class votes than the Social Democrats. Freedom Party leaders proudly pronounced themselves a "New Labor" party, signaling a proletarianization of the FPÖ electorate. The party's most effective message to capture voters who were once loyal supporters of the centrist ruling groups has been to warn that an influx of refugees will jeopardize the blessings of the welfare state-universal health care, child support, and free education for all.
NEVERTHELESS, HOFER'S ELECTION PROMISES, emblazoned on posters that read "Your Homeland Needs You Now" and "Austria Needs Safety," also demonstrate that what counts at this election is not facts but feelings-the feelings of voters convinced that they have been left out. It's a largely negative appeal to protest votes aimed at the established order and elites. Immigrants are not to blame for poorer economic performance, given that job data show some of the biggest losses in sectors where immigrants are not well represented: the arts, entertainment and recreation, real estate, science and technology, and finance and insurance industries.
FPÖ presents itself as an alternative to the mainstream parties, which it says have failed to offer credible solutions to pressing immigration and economic problems, and have lost the courage to develop a new and inspirational vision for the country's future. At the moment, the People's Party is almost indistinguishable from the Social Democrats, at least to voters. The blame falls in part on both center-right and center-left party leaders who have failed to respond effectively to the European debt crisis and to the migration crisis. Since the 2008 Great Recession, Austria's economy has underperformed compared with its European rivals, with sluggish growth and a soaring unemployment rate that has reached an unprecedented 10 percent. A series of corruption scandals have also stoked political disaffection.
But that is not the whole story. Hofer also favors gun rights, stricter border controls, and preventing gay couples from marrying or adopting children, and he opposes immigrants, particularly Muslims, globalization, the EU, and the euro. He is also for protecting the welfare state for Austrian citizens, enabling him to tap a broad variety of different political constituencies and cultural values. Not unlike Trump, Hofer also shifts easily between different positions, if that is what it takes to capture more voters. For example, following the U.K. Brexit vote in June, Hofer hinted that the Freedom Party might call a referendum on Austrian membership. But after opinion polls showed that his remarks had upset voters, he quickly backtracked, dropping any suggestions his party could take the country out of the EU.
It's impossible to identify one single factor that explains Hofer's success.
Probably immigration plays the first violin, but it is an orchestra of multiple factors that produces Austria's populist music. In other words, FPO's success is not as much about new ideas or programs as it is about anger, dissatisfaction, and the disappointment of people who feel betrayed by elites. Moreover, Van der Bellen, like Hofer, was something of a protest candidate. He, too, strongly repudiated Austria's centrist ruling parties, which have shared power for six decades, by campaigning against the entrenched system of patronage that he claimed had corrupted Austrian democracy over the years.
Some argue that even if Hofer wins, the election's significance would be limited because Austria has a parliamentary system in which political power lies with a government led by the chancellor. The Austrian president, by convention, has been largely a ceremonial role. But, as Hofer has indicated, he is prepared to use considerable executive powers that are available to the president, but that have never been used in post-WWII democratic Austria. These powers include appointing and dismissing ministers, and calling parliamentary elections. Hofer has even said he will sack the government if it doesn't take a sufficiently hard line on immigration.
That a far-right candidate for a party founded partly by Nazis and with a history of anti-Semitism is so close to winning the presidency in one of the European democracies is shocking and troubling. Austria's contribution to the Holocaust included 40 percent of the staff and 75 percent of commanders at concentration camps-even though Austrians comprised just 8 percent of the Third Reich's population and 13 percent of Hitler's SS. Moreover, after 1945, Austria largely failed to come to terms with its Nazi past. Hofer is trying to persuade the voters that his party is not an extreme right but a centrist party. He also has softened his extremist rhetoric. But what if he is only "a wolf in sheep's clothing," as Philip Oltermann has argued in The Guardian?
In his book, Dark Continent, Mark Mazower argues that liberal democracy was not universally accepted as the normal and natural form of government in 20th century Europe. He explains that fascism and Nazism were not simply aberrant deviations in the otherwise steady growth of democracy in Europe, but deeply rooted and accepted ideologies that were able to compete with liberalism and socialism for political dominance in the European political landscape of the time. The rise of nationalist populism in the West is reminiscent of the dramatic events of Europe's most nightmarish century. While the current populism is not the same as fascism or Nazism, the roots of its success lie in a profound crisis of liberal democracy and its institutions. As Mazower puts it, "the real problems lie in the dictator's shadow, in the conditions that enable the leader's rise."
