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Since the 1970s, European democracies have resorted to two strategies when confronted with the rise of radical right-wing parties. The most prevalent has been the cordon sanitaire, by which coalitions across the right-left divide have kept extremists from power. The less common but at times more successful has been the bear hug, where a right-wing fringe has been allowed to share power in the hope that the responsibility of office will domesticate it.
Ominously, both strategies have now run aground in Austria, where the far-right Freedom party looks set to be leading the next government after winning parliamentary elections last September. A first attempt at coalition talks between mainstream parties unravelled earlier this month, and Freedom party leader Herbert Kickl has been asked to try to form a government.
Austria wore out the cordon sanitaire long ago. For much of the postwar era, the Freedom party was excluded by a series of grand coalitions (barring a single early-1980s coalition with the Social Democrats), but these ultimately drove many voters to feel they had no alternative but the far right to express their frustrations. Exclusion was tried at the European level too — Vienna was ostracised by the EU when the Freedom party joined the government in 2000 — but it caused little long-term harm to the party’s fortunes.
The party had a further spell in government in 2017-19 and now seems on a path to the chancellery. In some countries — Finland, Norway, and Italy — right-wing fringe parties have either imploded or moderated their more radical positions when they have had to govern. In France, too, Marine Le Pen has made a big effort to detoxify her Rassemblement National party, expanding its appeal and bringing it closer to power.
The optimistic analysis of these cases is that liberal democracy is robust enough to change radical parties more than they can change it. It’s better, in this view, to include such parties in coalition-building, which requires compromise as the price of power. Excluding them — however many votes they receive — risks having them reject democracy altogether.
This has not held in Austria. The Freedom party’s last stint in power collapsed in scandal in 2019, when its then-leader Heinz-Christian Strache was caught on film contemplating Russian financial support. While the party lost significant support in the snap election that followed, it rebounded to its highest ever vote share (29 per cent) last year. Simultaneously, the party hardened rather than moderated its positions, embracing such illiberal notions as the “remigration” of immigrants and Austrians of foreign ancestry and employing rhetoric used by the Nazis.
Given the failure of both strategies, what should the Austrian political class now do? Conservatives, social democrats and liberals all deserve criticism for their failure to agree in the first round of coalition talks. Warning loudly about a threat to democracy only to fall out over economic and budget policy differences lacks all credibility. Mainstream parties in France and Germany must do better.
The centre-right Austrian People’s party (ÖVP), now engaged in talks with Kickl, has no good options: it will be the junior partner if a coalition forms, whereas new elections could well raise the Freedom party’s support further. That does not mean, however, it should abandon all red lines. It is all the more important to choose them well. In particular, the ÖVP carries the burden of safeguarding the next government from far-right attempts to rig the system from within — and protecting Austria from becoming, like some of its neighbours, a spoiler in Europe.
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Publish date : 2025-01-19 06:00:00
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