Austria

Date range: 1980-2020

Case notes

Austrian Freedom Party

The Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ) traces its roots back to organisations representing former Nazis disenfranchised in Austria’s initial post-war elections. After founding as a party in 1956 its first two leaders were former Nazis and the party carried an illiberal taboo in the party system (Fallend 2012, 116–17). With an ideologically ambiguous character, it participated in several minority governments before 1980, and strived to moderate its controversial image. We see no evidence that it was populist by our definition in the 1983 election, so we’ve included it in the dataset only from 1986, when Jörg Haider took it over and moved the party to the hard right in policy and rhetoric (most authors agree that this is when it should be classified as populist, see: Van Kessel 2015, 35; Heinrisch, 2013, 47; Fallend 2012, 117; McGann and Kitschelt 2005, 151). After improving its electoral performance through the 1990s the FPÖ joined a coalition government with the centre right ÖVP between 2000 and 2005, following which Haider split off to form his own party (BZÖ) that took the FPÖ’s spot in the coalition. The FPÖ then became a new opposition party under the leadership of one of Haider’s former mentees Heinze-Christian Strache, who gradually rebuilt its following to peak at 26% in the 2017 election, after which it again formed coalition government with the ÖVP. After Strache was caught on tape dealing corruptly with an undercover journalist (the “Ibiza Affair”) he was forced to leave politics, and the party’s vote dropped to 16% in the 2019 elections.

Haider converted the FPÖ into a protest vehicle that tapped into the dissatisfaction with the political system. A cornerstone of this was his opposition to “partitocracy” of the dominant national parties, the SPÖ and ÖVP (McGann and Kitschelt 2005, 151). Haider’s rhetoric projected a system in which a “ruling class” (cited in Wodak 2013, 23) was both homogenous and fundamentally separate from the ordinary people (Bauböck 2009, 243). He accused this political elite of enjoying embedded privileges that allowed them to line their own pockets at the expense of ordinary people (Höbelt 2003, 56). In Betz’s words, the FPÖ:

pursued ‘a strategy of system change’ intended to liberate the ordinary citizen from the political parties… Its self-proclaimed goal was to solve what it saw as one of Austria's most urgent political problems, namely citizens’ growing alienation from the state, by engineering Austria's transition from a ‘party state’ to a ‘citizens’ democracy. (Betz 2001, 401)

Even when the party was in government, Haider continued this stance by fashioning himself into a kind of internal “opposition” within the coalition (Heinrisch, 2013, 51). After Haider stepped down from the leadership the party appears to have maintained this stance (see Heinisch, Werner, and Habersack 2020; Wodak and Forchtner 2014). Stache, for example, has alleged that the government deliberately allowed for the asylum system to be abused in order to tend to the interests of the “asylum industry” at the expense of the people (Ajanovic, Mayer, and Sauer 2018, 13). For this we have coded the party 3 on OTH_POLCLASS for the duration of its time in the dataset.

Soon after taking control of the party Haider made antipathy to immigrants and ethnic others a core component of its discourse and agenda under an “Austria first” platform. Initially his ethnocentric rhetoric was largely based in antisemitic comments and symbolism (at one point he alleged that he was a victim of a “Jewish” smear campaign, see: Heinrisch, 2013, 63), and included other forms of xenophobia (McGann and Kitschelt 2005, 151–63). The party succeeded in mobilising against immigration and asylum seekers in the context of the crisis in the Bulkans in the early Haider days, but from the 1990s dramatically turned its attention to Muslim migrants (Fallend 2012, 118), whom it considered as a cultural threat to the nation, a drain on the welfare system, and a source of crime and radicalism (Heinrisch, 2013, 62–63). Strache has maintained this “virulently anti-Muslim” posture (Turner-Graham 2008, 181), with the party campaigning against “invading Muslim hordes” (Wodak and Forchtner 2014, 239) and conflating immigration with crime under his leadership. We’ve therefore coded the FPÖ 3 on both OTH_ETHNIC and OTH_IMMIGRANT.

There was a clear anti-foreign element to Haider’s Austria First rhetoric, and at one point he targeted the “Brussels mafia” during debates about European integration in the 1990 (though he ended up supporting membership) (Hockenos 1995, 76). The party then took an anti-EU line in the 2000s on the slogan “People’s Representatives instead of EU-Traitors” (Turner-Graham 2008, 197). By the late 2010s (or possibly earlier), Strache and other party leaders claimed that the government was a “stooge” of European Commission, “agents” of the EU, and “the parrot of Merkel” (Heinisch, Werner, and Habersack 2020, 171). This appears to be an elevation of OTH_FOREIGN rhetoric, and hence we’ve coded the party 3 on this variable from 2016 and 2 before then, although the timing of this shift could be investigated further. We’ve seen nothing that indicates any hostility to the military (OTH_MLITARY = 1).

Haider was clearly a very effective and charismatic leader (Hockenos 1995, 76) (Murphy 2004, 306), known for performatively braking taboos surrounding political correctness (Betz 2001, 407). Strache appears to have modelled his own image on Haider (Heinrisch, 2013, 52), and has been just as important to the FPÖ’s image as Haider was (Heinrisch, 2013, 57). Due to the strong influence of its leaders the FPÖ has been called a “leader cult” (Bailer 2018). However the party clearly has an institutional history that goes beyond its leaders (Heinrisch, 2013, 65), and has withstood multiple leadership transitions. We have therefore coded it as 2 on CHARISMA.

The party's economic agenda is complicated (see Heinrisch, 2013, 64), but it has generally remained liberal and deregulatory, despite the occasional comment against international capitalism. There are also elements of liberal or libertarian ideas in its policies (McGann and Kitschelt 2005, 152; Rathgeb 2021, 646). We've kept the OTH_ECONOMIC variable at 1 and coded it FR in LRPOSITION due to the salience of its cultural majoritarianism.

The FPÖ (even well before Haider’s arrival) had a clearly illiberal image within Austria due to their linkage to former Nazis (Fallend 2012, 115). Haider’s right wing majoritarian and ethnocentric rhetoric clearly re-established this image, as has his (and Strache’s) various associations with far-right groups in their youth. The party’s calls for a more direct and republican democratic model have also been viewed as illiberal in this context (see Adamson 2010, 156). However we’ve not found any evidence that party has linked the party’s actions or policies to violations of liberal democratic norms in the institutional sense. We’ve coded it 2 for LIBDEMNORMS due to its Nazi lineage, but this could be investigated more. We’ve coded the party 2 on INSIDER in each election since 2000, after which it formed a coalition government with the ÖVP.

Alliance for the Future of Austria

The Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, BZÖ) was formed when Haider reacted to discontent with the FPÖ's grassroots and split the parliamentary group off from the party. He served as leader of the new party, and sought a relatively more moderate orientation that was more open to forming government (Heinrisch, 2013, 48). Although most of the far right policies are similar to the FPÖ, it is difficult to decide whether these differences would manifest on a 1-3 scale. Given that the party was led by Haider, we’ve coded it the same as FPÖ in the one election in which it scored above 5% (2008). The exception to this is the CHARISMA variable, given that the new party was formed around Haider.

Team Stronach

Founded in 2012, Team Stronach (TS) was a vehicle for Canadian-Austrian billionaire Frank Stronach. An “entrepreneurial party” backed financially by Stronach and linked to his business (Heinisch and Saxonberg 2017, 210), TS spent heavily in the election and recruited several BZÖ MPs to form a parliamentary caucus before the election. It won 5.7 % in the election, narrowly making it past the 4% threshold to enter parliament, but dissolved into infighting soon afterward and did not participate in the 2017 election.

Stronach’s central campaign theme was his “radical anti-establishment” hostility towards the political class (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 96), whom he considered fundamentally corrupt (Dolezal and Zeglovits 2014, 646; Schmuck, Matthes, and Boomgaarden 2016, 88; Van Kessel 2015, 35; Brett 2013, 411). Stronach’s rhetoric crafted politicians as self-serving and categorically estranged from the interests and experiences of citizens (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 98). This is well-captured by one of his catch phrases: “the politicians want to serve themselves. I want to serve Austria” (Luther 2014, 24) (OTH_POLCLASS = 3). According to several sources, Stronach also targeted business elites and banks (especially in the context of the Euro debt crisis) (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 98), considering them an element of the corrupt “system” alongside politicians (Luther 2014, 25). As this appears somewhat narrow we’ve coded him 2 on OTH_ECONOMIC = 2. Euroscepticism was also a key part of his narrative (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 98; Dolezal and Zeglovits 2014, 645), albeit not quite to the level that would warrant a 3 on OTH_FOREIGN (= 2). We’ve seen nothing that indicates any hostility to the military (OTH_MILITARY = 1).

Stronach’s central policy platform was economic neoliberalism, stressing his business credentials and a managerial approach to governance (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 95). He did not target immigrants (Heinrisch, 2013, 49; Dolezal and Zeglovits 2014, 645), or make xenophobic statements (Brett 2013, 411) (OTH_ETHNIC = 1, OTH_IMMIGRANTS = 1). Given the salience of his economic liberalism he has been generally positioned on the ideological right (Schmuck, Matthes, and Boomgaarden 2016, 86) (LRPOSITION = R). Although Stronach had a number of somewhat authoritarian law and order positions (including advocating the return of the death penalty), we’ve not seen enough evidence to consider his campaign a threat to liberal democratic norms (LIBDEMNORMS = 1). As its name suggests, the party was Stronach’s “personal project” (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 95) and relied on his charisma (Heinisch and Saxonberg 2017, 220). Media coverage also focused far more on Frank Stronach than on his party (Hloušek, Kopeček, and Vodová 2020, 97), and there appeared to be no organisational coherence other that his leadership (CHARISMA = 3). Stronach did not serve in any government before the campaign (INSIDER = 1).

References

Adamson, Goran. 2010. The Spectre of Austria—Reappraising the Rise of the Freedom Party from 1986 to 2000. London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom).

Ajanovic, Edma, Stefanie Mayer, and Birgit Sauer. 2018. ‘Constructing “the People” An Intersectional Analysis of Right-Wing Concepts of Democracy and Citizenship in Austria’. Journal of Language and Politics 17 (5): 636–54.

Bailer, Brigitte. 2018. ‘The FPÖ of Jörg Haider—Populist or Extreme Right-Winger?’ In Women in Austria, 164–73. Routledge.

Bauböck, Rainer. 2009. ‘Constructing the Boundaries of the Volk: Nation-Building and National Populism in Austrian Politics’. In The Haider Phenomenon in Austria, edited by Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, 231–54. New Brunswick, NJ.: Transaction Publishers.

Betz, Hans-Georg. 2001. ‘Exclusionary Populism in Austria, Italy, and Switzerland’. International Journal 56 (3): 393–420.

Brett, William. 2013. ‘What’s an Elite to Do? The Threat of Populism from Left, Right and Centre’. The Political Quarterly 84 (3): 410–13.

Dolezal, Martin, and Eva Zeglovits. 2014. ‘Almost an Earthquake: The Austrian Parliamentary Election of 2013’. West European Politics 37 (3): 644–52.

Fallend, Franz. 2012. ‘Populism in Government: The Case of Austria’. In Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy?, 113–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heinisch, Reinhard, and Steven Saxonberg. 2017. ‘Entrepreneurial Populism and the Radical Centre: Examples from Austria and the Czech Republic’. In Political Populism, 209–26. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG.

Heinisch, Reinhard, Annika Werner, and Fabian Habersack. 2020. ‘Reclaiming National Sovereignty: The Case of the Conservatives and the Far Right in Austria’. European Politics and Society 21 (2): 163–81.

Heinrisch, Reinhard. 2013. ‘Austrian Right-Wing Populism: A Surprising Comeback under a New Leader’. In Exposing the Demagogues: Right-Wing and National Populist Parties in Europe, edited by Karsten Grabow and Florian Hartleb, 47–79. Brussels, Centre for European Studies. http://www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_35420-544-2-30.pdf?140519123322.

Hloušek, Vít, Lubomír Kopeček, and Petra Vodová. 2020. ‘Two Tycoons and Their One-Man Shows’. In The Rise of Entrepreneurial Parties in European Politics, edited by Vít Hloušek, Lubomír Kopeček, and Petra Vodová, 93–117. Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41916-5_4.

Höbelt, Lothar. 2003. Defiant Populist: Jörg Haider and the Politics of Austria. Purdue University Press.

Hockenos, Paul. 1995. ‘Jörg Haider: Austria’s Far Right Wunderkind’. World Policy Journal 12 (3): 75–80.

Luther, Kurt Richard. 2014. ‘Austrian Populism and the Not-so-Great Recession. The Primacy of Politics’. KEPRU Working Paper 38.

McGann, Anthony J., and Herbert Kitschelt. 2005. ‘The Radical Right in the Alps: Evolution of Support for the Swiss SVP and Austrian FPÖ’. Party Politics 11 (2): 147–71.

Murphy, Anthony. 2004. ‘The Rise of the Austrian Freedom Party in the 1990s: A Culturalist Approach’. Österreichische Zeitschrift Für Politikwissenschaft 33 (3): 297–307.

Rathgeb, Philip. 2021. ‘Makers against Takers: The Socio-Economic Ideology and Policy of the Austrian Freedom Party’. West European Politics 44 (3): 635–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2020.1720400.

Schmuck, Desirée, Jörg Matthes, and Hajo Boomgaarden. 2016. ‘Austria: Candidate-Centered and Anti-Immigrant Right-Wing Populism’. In Populist Political Communication in Europe, edited by Toril Aalberg, Frank Esser, Carsten Reinemann, Jesper Stromback, and Claes De Vreese, 85–102. New York: Routledge.

Turner-Graham, Emily. 2008. ‘Austria First: HC Strache, Austrian Identity and the Current Politics of Austria’s Freedom Party’’. Studies in Language & Capitalism 3 (4): 181–98.

Van Kessel, Stijn. 2015. Populist Parties in Europe: Agents of Discontent? Springer.

Wodak, Ruth. 2013. ‘“Anything Goes!”–The Haiderization of Europe’. In Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse, edited by Ruth Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik, and Brigitte Mral, 23–37. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Wodak, Ruth, and Bernhard Forchtner. 2014. ‘Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: Right-Wing Populism, Collective Memory and the Fictionalisation of Politics’. Visual Communication 13 (2): 231–55.