Far Right Go Far in Vienna
The Freedom Party of Austria (fpo) gained 27.1 percent of the vote in municipal elections in Vienna held on October 10, up from only 14.8 percent in 2005. Led by Heinz-Christian Strache, the party nearly equaled the result it achieved under the late Jörg Haider in 1996, when it won 27.9 percent.
The Social Democratic Party (spo) won only 44.2 percent of the vote, down from 49.1 percent in 2005. It has run Vienna for over 90 years, with a brief interruption during World War ii, when the Nazis took over.
“The election marks a seismic shift in the Alpine country’s political landscape,” writes the Wall Street Journal. “For decades, Vienna, Austria’s capital and largest city, has been referred to as das Rote Wien, or ‘red Vienna,’ a reference to the Social Democrats’ strong grip on the city.”
The fpo campaigned with an anti-immigration agenda, calling for a ban on new mosques and on headscarves. It handed out pamphlets showing pictures of the Ottoman Turks’ siege of Vienna in 1683.
The spo now has only 49 out of the 100 seats in the city parliament. However, it will almost certainly not form an alliance with the fpo, favoring mainstream parties instead. In its campaign, it produced a comic book portraying the fpo as a bunch of Nazi zombies.
To really understand these election results, one must go back to October 2008, when influential neo-Nazi leader Haider died in a car crash. Haider had left the fpo in 2005 and founded another far-right party, the Alliance for Austria’s Future (bzo). These two parties split the far-right vote. The division made them weak. But with Haider gone, the bzo didn’t receive enough votes to enter parliament. Instead, the extremists appeared to concentrate their votes on the fpo. As the Trumpet warned almost two years ago, “If Austria’s two pro-Nazi parties unify in one camp, the power of Austria’s centralist political parties would be greatly undermined.”
The continuing rise of right-wing parties in Europe is a dangerous barometer reading, portending some stormy political weather ahead. Right-wing extremism is become dangerously normal. To understand more about the rise of the right in Austria, see our article “Austria Returns to the Far Right.”