Austria's Freedom Party got a realistic chance this weekend to lead the country's next government, after talks between the three main parties broke down.
The rise of the Freedom Party will put its fiery leader, Herbert Kickl, in the chancellorship and mark a new high-water mark for the far-right party's rise in Europe.
The Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, was expected to give Mr. Kickl, whose party won the majority of seats in the national assembly in the September elections, is tasked with building a coalition when the two men meet on Monday. The meeting could be the first official step on the road that will eventually lead to a new government.
Mr. Kickl, whose party was founded in the 1950s by former members of the SS, the Nazi police, campaigned on a hardline anti-immigrant platform. The party has a history of denigrating immigrants in Austria as criminals and social sponges.
He called for a temporary moratorium on accepting new asylum seekers and a law that would prevent asylum seekers from becoming Austrian citizens. Mr. Kickl promised to make Austria a fortress, and his party introduced it by using the term “Volkskanzer” before campaign speeches, evoking the rise of German fascism.
The top leader of the Austrian People's Party, known by its Austrian initials ÖVP, announced on Sunday that it would be open to coalition talks with the Freedom Party, despite a campaign promise that the ÖVP would not form a coalition with the party as Mr. Kickl was driving it.
Karl Nehammer, the chancellor of Austria's ÖVP, announced on Saturday that he would resign as chancellor and the party leadership.
The events alarmed Austrian political observers.
“The picture we present to the world is, of course, not only a shift to the right but also instability – some people even call it chaos,” said Peter Filzmaier, a political scientist at the University of Graz and Krems.
Twenty-nine percent of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party. The ÖVP, which has led the Austrian government since 2017, got 26 percent. Until this weekend, it seems that the Freedom Party is still going to be kicked out of the government because all other parties have refused to join it.
Christian Kocker, who was immediately elected to replace Mr. Nehammer as head of the ÖVP on Sunday, in a statement sent to the press that he expects President van der Bellen to ask Mr. Kickl to start coalition talks. Mr. Kocker also said “if we are invited to the talks, we will accept this invitation.”
It may take many weeks, maybe months, before a government under Mr. Kickl. It would be among the first far-right governments in Europe, showing how the electorate is unhappy with migration and economic unrest and is increasingly turning to the right.
Last year in France, for example, the far-right party National Rally won almost a third of the votes in the European Union parliamentary elections. At the end of 2023, Dutch voters gave Geert Wilders' anti-Islam Party for Freedom an important victory. the ballot box, leading to a new government four months later.
The Freedom Party is currently part of five regional governments and was a junior coalition partner with the ÖVP in the national government until it was derailed by a scandal involving a fake Russian heiress video with the party's leader.
Before that, Mr. Kickl served as the country's interior minister, responsible for public security and migration, among other issues.
Now that the coalition talks between the conservatives and the progressives have ended, the coalition talks between the Freedom Party and the ÖVP may go well, say political analysts in Vienna, noting that in many areas the parties have a lot in common.
Laurenz Enser-Jedenastik, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, said the ÖVP's commitment last summer not to work with the Freedom Party had much to do with the strategy of trying to remain the largest party in the coalition and retain the chancellorship.
“All the barriers are now being dismantled very quickly – which shows how high-profile this shutdown strategy was,” he said.
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