Austria turns right, but will Europe follow?
Border anxiety helped propel Kurz into power
LONDON • The dramatic victory of Sebastian Kurz in Sunday’s Austrian election will send shock waves across Europe. The dashing new chancellor is a political prodigy: not only because he is just 31, but because he is leading a mainstream conservative party into territory previously dominated by the far-right.
Exit polls say his People’s Party emerged as the clear winner and will probably form a new coalition with the populist Freedom Party and its leader Heinz-Christian Strache, whom Kurz deftly outflanked.
Still, this means Austrians have elected their most right-wing government since Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938.
Does this mean a return to the politics of the 1930s, or even to the 1980s, when the former UN secretary general Kurt Waldheim was elected Austrian president, despite having hidden his Nazi past?
Certainly not: Kurz has nothing in common with Waldheim’s lies and evasions, still less with the anti-Semitism that his election stirred up. But Strache, who will probably now be vice-chancellor, once joined a neo-Nazi youth organization and his party has a dubious record. Kurz will therefore need to stamp his authority on his coalition partners from the outset. He promises to impose tough new restrictions on refugees and economic migrants to ensure that Austria is never again overwhelmed by an influx on the scale of two years ago. He is thereby breaking with the cosy liberal establishment that has dominated politics in Vienna for decades, but has also beaten back the far-right.
The reason for Kurz’s ascent can be put in two words: border anxiety.
Austrians have seen themselves as Europe’s sentinels since the Ottoman Turks were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
They are at once cosmopolitan in culture and nationalist in politics. Austria was happy to adopt coffee from the Turks, but remains deeply suspicious of Islam. Its new ban on the burka and niqab is very popular.
Kurz, who would be the world’s youngest head of government, frequently boasted that as foreign minister he had closed the Balkan route for asylum seekers in 2016 by shutting Austrian borders to new arrivals. He promised to pressure Europe to do the same now with the central Mediterranean route.
“If there’s one topic that really dominated the campaign, it’s migration and integration,” said Sylvia Kritzinger at the University of Vienna. “Especially with Kurz, it always came back to immigration. We had very little discussion of the issues beyond that.”
Since taking the helm in the spring amid growing strains between the governing Social Democratic People’ s Party coalition, Kurz moved his centre-right party further to the right, particularly on the issues of migration and Muslims. But he avoided the inflammatory rhetoric of the right-wing Freedom Party and its head, Strache.
Having embraced the EU’s freedom of movement and even the open borders of the Schengen Agreement, Austria suffered a rude awakening in 2015 when German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed more than a million migrants into Germany, most of them via Vienna.
Not for the first time, Austrians felt boxed in by decisions made in Berlin. As foreign minister, Kurz saw his chance to speak for a nation gripped by border anxiety — and he seized it.
This tale from the Vienna woods is likely to be replicated across the continent. Everywhere, the same pressures from uncontrolled migration are making themselves felt: on housing, on public services, on security. Such pressures will only grow as tens of millions of migrants from Africa and Asia head to Europe over the next decade. And so mainstream leaders have been repositioning themselves to see off populist challenges, from Mark Rutte in the Netherlands to Emmanuel Macron in France.
Conservatives who ignore border anxiety are doomed to lose power to the populists, as Merkel now knows to her chagrin. Last month’s election has left her ruling coalition in tatters.