Austria’s Rightward Lurch Is Europe’s New Normal

By STEVEN ERLANGER and JAMES KANTER

OCT. 16, 2017

BRUSSELS — Rather than a sudden lurch to the right, the victory of conservative and far-right parties in Austria’s elections Sunday was another reflection of the new normal in Europe, where anti-immigration populism and nationalism are challenging the European Union’s commitment to open borders for trade and immigration.

Nearly 58 percent of Austrians who voted cast ballots for center-right or far-right parties, with the far-right Freedom Party running neck-and-neck for second place with the establishment center-left. But the theme of the election was identity — anti-immigration and anti-Islamization — with the charismatic winner, Sebastian Kurz, just 31, tellingly absorbing much of the far-right’s agenda to transform his once-mainstream conservative People’s Party.

Mr. Kurz must now decide whether to create a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party or to renew a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats, which would ease European concerns to some degree about another populist party in government. But the message is clear: populism is vibrant in democratic Europe, and especially so in its eastern precincts.

Ivan Krastev, a political scientist who works in Vienna and Sofia, Bulgaria, sees the migration crisis, which has hardly ended, as the main threat to the European Union. “The resistance of liberals to conceding any negative effects of migration has triggered the anti-establishment (and particularly anti-mainstream media) reaction that is convulsing political life,” he wrote in his recent book, “AfterWing Rises MAY 9, 2016

Mr. Krastev sees the divisions over migration most sharply between the countries of Western Europe like Germany and those of the east, like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which view “the very cosmopolitan values on which the European Union is based as a threat.” The populist revolt is not simply against mainstream parties, he argues, but against meritocratic elites who have arguably lost touch with their roots.

In Austria, which likes to think of itself as the bridge between the western and eastern countries of Europe, Mr. Kurz faces a serious choice: try to isolate a popular populist party, as in Sweden, or bring it into government and try to tame it, as in Norway. But with nationalist, populist parties already a part of several European governments, and in power in Hungary and Poland, the European Union has little appetite for imposing sanctions or other penalties.

As successful as Mr. Kurz was in reviving his own party — even changing its colors from black to turquoise — he failed to stem the appeal of the Freedom Party, which won roughly the same percentage of votes as it did in its previous heyday in 1999, under Jörg Haider, when its roots in provincial nationalism and neo-Nazism were more obvious.

Back then, the conservative Wolfgang Schüssel broke a taboo by bringing the Freedom Party into government, and Europeans reacted with horror. Without waiting for the new government to do anything, European governments imposed diplomatic sanctions on Austria.

But they organized their effort, said Stefan Lehne, a former senior Austrian diplomat, without using the institutions of the European Union, for fear that open confrontation would only bolster the fortunes of far-right parties like France’s National Front and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, a populist, nationalist Flemish party.

“It was simply done on the basis of phone calls from one prime minister to another,” Mr. Lehne said. “And it was completely counterproductive and led to counteraction among Austrians, who felt it unjustified.” The effort was abandoned several months later.

“The move backfired, and the experience has inhibited actions thereafter,” said Rosa Balfour, a senior fellow in the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund. She cited the bloc’s failure to impose any effective sanctions on Hungary and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has championed “illiberal democracy” and has signaled his admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The experience of government decimated the Freedom Party, which dropped to 5 percent in the polls and split. Mr. Haider died in a car accident in 2008, depriving the party of its most charismatic figure. The party has since been revived on a platform of ethnic identity, anti-Islamization and anti-immigration, but with a slightly softer face, repressing its neo-Nazi past and embracing the European Union.

The party reached 20.5 percent of the vote four years ago and nearly won the presidential election last year. It was aided this time by the dissolution of a similar and rival far-right party founded by, and named after, an Austrian-Canadian businessman, Frank Stronach.

Austria has usually voted for center-right and right-wing parties, and it was late to examine its history under the Nazis. It preferred to see itself as the “first victim” of the Austrian-born Hitler, instead of a willing collaborator with the Third Reich and its racist, anti-Semitic policies.

Even in mid-1980s, when it was revealed that Kurt Waldheim had lied about his service as an intelligence officer in the Nazi army, the Austrians elected him anyway. Throughout his six-year term he was ostracized by many countries, including the United States.

For the European Union, the potential challenge from Austria is similar to that from Poland and Hungary, which welcomed the Kurz victory; a coalition between Mr. Kurz and the Freedom Party would create a government more like that of those two countries and less like ones in Germany or France. Still, Mr. Kurz is strongly pro-European, and the Freedom Party has largely dropped its euroskepticism after losing last year’s presidential election, when voters made clear “they didn’t want it,” Mr. Lehne said.

Mr. Kurz has refused to say what coalition he prefers, but given that Austria will take over the European Union presidency in the last half of next year, he is expected to remain “pretty mainstream,” Mr. Lehne said. “Expect a restrictive attitude to migration,” with limits to social benefits to E.U. workers in Austria,” he said, adding: “But that is mainstream now.”

For the European Union, there are few options other than constructive engagement, the way that Brussels is working with President Andrzej Duda to restrain what it sees as the most destructive policies of the Polish government — those aiming to restrict the news media and the judiciary.

The European Union “can, reluctantly, work with such governments, but it can cause difficulties for certain policy areas, especially migration,” said Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Center, a research organization in Brussels.

But the imposition of sanctions under the Lisbon Treaty would require clear violations of democratic values and constitutional rules. It is a high threshold, Mr. Zuleeg said, as evident with Poland and Hungary, where numerous challenges have gone unpenalized.

“This would be only in case of clear infringements and would take time after the government has been in place and has done something obviously against E.U. principles,” he said.

Yet, the so-called nuclear option — suspending a member state’s voting rights — has never been used, and there is little prospect it will be, given the lingering unpopularity of the European Union in many parts of the 28-nation bloc.

Instead, said Ms. Balfour of the German Marshall Fund, an ideal forum for arm-twisting should be the European People’s Party, the regional transnational grouping of center-right parties, including Mr. Kurz’s People’s Party.

“You can ask if the Austrian center-right has already embraced many Freedom Party policies that do not conform to European principles,” she said. “What is missing is informal politics that can contain these kinds of situations, by putting pressure on leaders to stay within the arena of democratic politics.”

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