Unlock Editor’s Digest for free
FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Since the 1970s, European democracies have resorted to two strategies in the face of the rise of radical right parties. The most frequent has been cordon sanitairethrough which coalitions across the left-right divide have kept extremists out of power. The least common, but sometimes most successful, has been the bear hug, where a right-wing sector has been allowed to share power in the hope that the responsibility of office will tame it.
What is disturbing is that both strategies have now run aground in Austriawhere the far-right Freedom Party appears poised to lead the next government after winning the parliamentary elections. last september. A first attempt at coalition talks between the main parties untangled earlier this month, and Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl He has been asked to try to form a government.
Austria exhausted the cordon sanitaire a long time ago. For much of the postwar era, the Freedom Party was excluded by a series of large coalitions (except for a single coalition with the Social Democrats in the early 1980s), but these eventually led many voters to feel that they had no another alternative than the extreme right to express themselves. their frustrations. Exclusion was also attempted at the European level (Vienna was ostracized by the EU when the Freedom Party joined the government in 2000), but it caused little long-term damage to the party’s fortunes.
The party had a new term in government in 2017-19 and now appears to be on its way to the chancellorship. In some countries (Finland, Norway and Italy) marginal right-wing parties have imploded or moderated their most radical positions when they have had to govern. Also in France, Marine Le Pen has made a concerted effort to detoxify her National Rally party, broadening its appeal and bringing it closer to power.
The optimistic analysis of these cases is that liberal democracy is strong enough to change radical parties more than they can change it. From this point of view, it is better to include those parties in coalition building, which requires compromise as the price of power. Excluding them – no matter how many votes they receive – runs the risk of them rejecting democracy altogether.
This has not happened in Austria. The Freedom Party’s last period 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 early elections that followed, it recovered to reach its highest vote share (29 percent) last year. At the same time, the party hardened rather than moderated its positions, adopting such illiberal notions as the “remigration” of immigrants and Austrians of foreign descent and employing rhetoric used by the Nazis.
Given the failure of both strategies, what should the Austrian political class do now? The Conservatives, Social Democrats and Liberals deserve criticism for failing to reach an agreement in the first round of coalition talks. Warning loudly about a threat to democracy and then fighting over differences in economic and budgetary policies lacks all credibility. The dominant parties in France and Germany must do better.
The centre-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), which is now in talks with Kickl, has no good options: it will be the junior partner if a coalition is formed, while new elections could further boost the Freedom Party’s support. However, that doesn’t mean you should abandon all red lines. It is even more important to choose them well. In particular, the ÖVP bears the burden of safeguarding the next government from far-right attempts to manipulate the system from within, and of protecting Austria from becoming, like some of its neighbors, a spoiler in Europe.