How Far Can the Far Right Fall?

October 11: Vienna regional elections
Social Democratic Party (SPÖ): 41.6% (+2)
Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP):  20.4% (+11.2)
Greens: 14.8% (+3)
Neos: 7.5% (+1.3)
Freedom Party (FPÖ): 7.1% (-23.7)
Team HC Strache: 3.3% (new)

Heinz-Christian Strache, or “HC,” has been a fixture in Austrian politics for the better part of three decades. After getting his start as a city councilman in the early 1990s, he climbed the ranks of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) and took over as national party leader in 2005, engineering the aggressively anti-Islam and anti-immigration rhetoric it’s known for today. Thanks to a series of slogans featuring xenophobic puns like Daham statt Islam (“The homeland over Islam”), a tradition of cringe-worthy, 80s-inflected campaign songs and a brand of populist rhetoric that allowed him to build up an ardent following on social media, everyone in Vienna—and across Austria—knows who Strache is and what he stands for.

To track Strache’s rise and fall is to trace the last 15 years of the far-right’s overall fate in Austria, one of the countries where it is well-established and consistently strong. The FPÖ has served in federal government twice in the last 20 years, alongside the right-wing People’s Party (ÖVP); it is a generally accepted part of the political landscape. Strache, who headed the party during the second of those stints in government, has played an outsized role in his party’s successes and failures.

Sunday’s result is, presumably, the final act in his narrative arc in elected politics: After being forced out of the FPÖ due to scandal and attempting a comeback as head of his own splinter party, “Team HC Strache,” he couldn’t muster the 5 percent necessary to win seats in Vienna’s city council elections. What’s more, his former party, the FPÖ, lost three-quarters of its support. Taken together, the results signal longer-term losses for the far right in Austria. Even on its signature issues of migration and integration, voters are starting to turn elsewhere—or, disappointed in their leaders’ conduct, are deciding to sit out elections entirely.

Vienna is both the capital city and one of Austria’s nine federal states, so its city council is the equivalent of a state-level parliament. The city is large, rich and powerful—which gives it more sway in the national political conversation than other states typically have.

The last time Vienna held elections for its city council, in 2015, Strache and the FPÖ were still bringing in new support. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had just begun arriving in Europe, and the FPÖ—a party that had long depended on anti-foreigner messaging—began to talk about the supposed dangers those newcomers posed to Vienna. The response to this rhetoric from the Viennese was enthusiastic: the party received nearly 31 percent of the vote that year, its best-ever result, making it the second-largest force in Viennese politics after the long-reigning, moderate Social Democrats (SPÖ). Two years later, it won 26 percent in parliamentary elections and joined the government as the partner of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and his ÖVP.

And then came the so-called Ibiza affair. In May 2019, nearly a year and a half into the Kurz- and Strache-led government, two German news outlets reported on a secret video recording from the Spanish island of Ibiza in which Strache and a fellow Viennese FPÖ politician seem to be offering government contracts and influence in exchange for election help from a woman they believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch. The revelations forced Strache’s resignation as vice-chancellor and brought about the collapse of Austria’s government and fresh parliamentary elections. Many of the FPÖ’s core voters initially stuck by the party and by Strache—until a second scandal surfaced a few months later, in which documents showed that Strache misused hundreds of thousands of euros in party funds to pay for his lavish lifestyle. The party lost 10 percent in last fall’s elections. Shortly thereafter, Strache was forced out for good (Kurz rebounded quickly: He reassumed the office of chancellor in January of this year). 

His campaign as the head of the “Team HC Strache” splinter party this fall, running as competition to his former colleagues in the FPÖ was a test of whether Viennese voters were willing to overlook his recent string of major missteps and back him and his personality-driven style of politics. The FPÖ, meanwhile, sought another chance without their bombastic leader. The answers were not encouraging for either party. Strache won just 3.3 percent of the vote, far below the 5 percent he needed to win seats in the city council; the FPÖ, meanwhile, lost nearly three-quarters of its 2015 electorate in Vienna, winning just 7.1 percent this time. Approximately 100,000 far-right voters from 2015 opted not to show up at all this year.

All this is happening amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has  cut into support for far-right parties across Europe; both the FPÖ and Strache have been heavily critical of the government’s virus mitigation measures, a message that appeals to only a narrow slice of the electorate. That may have played a role in just how abysmal the results turned out for both parties. Still, Ibiza loomed large in voters’ minds: exit polling data found that more than a third of voters said it had a very large or somewhat large influence over their vote choice, noteworthy numbers for a 17-month-old scandal.

Rather than apologizing for his conduct during the campaign, Strache doubled down on casting himself as the aggrieved, blameless victim of an elite plot. The refrain in his campaign song says a vote for him will “hurt the powerful.” At a final rally a few days before Election Day, Strache decried what he referred to as a shadowy criminal movement that “wants to destroy” him. “I have never betrayed my voters and I will never betray them,” he said, asserting he had been vindicated in the aftermath of both scandals. “I am not corrupt!” (In fact, he is still under police investigation both with regard to his actions in Ibiza and his misuse of party funds.)

Gerald Panagl, a local volunteer for Strache’s campaign, told me after the rally – which brought together a few hundred supporters on a market square in the city’s ethnically-diverse Favoriten district – that he had always voted for the FPÖ but had never been actively involved in politics, until the Ibiza scandal. “The fact that people”—he didn’t specify who precisely—“use these kinds of methods to take out political opponents… that can never happen again in the future,” Panagl said.

But Sylvia, a middle-aged woman standing off to the side as Strache’s rally began—who, like most far-right voters in Austria I spoke with, declined to give her last name—was less convinced. “I used to vote for Strache fairly often, but after the most recent developments… I can’t hear about Ibiza anymore, I don’t want to hear about it anymore,” she told me. “No normal citizen can do those kinds of things—I don’t expect it from my politicians, either.” Why was she watching the speech then, I asked? “Because we went shopping,” she told me, holding up a canvas bag full of groceries. “We have to take the subway home and discovered this along the way,” she said.

 The FPÖ, for its part, spent the campaign arguing that it had moved beyond the scandals because Strache is no longer part of the party. It has opted for the simplest explanation for its own collapse on Sunday, one which allows its current leaders to deflect responsibility: It exclusively blames Strache, although he has been on his own for nearly a year. Speaking with the television broadcaster ORF shortly after the first projections came in, FPÖ mayoral candidate Dominik Nepp attributed his party’s fortunes to a “loss of trust” due to Strache’s repeated scandals.

Although Kurz’s party benefited from the FPÖ’s collapse, picking up 11 points, Sunday’s results mean the dominance of left-of-center parties remains in place. The center-left SPÖ received 41.6 percent of the vote, a modest increase, and its coalition partner the Greens also saw a small rise in support. Current mayor Michael Ludwig, a member of the SPÖ, will most likely continue that governing arrangement, the same one that’s been in place for a decade—and continue to serve as a powerful counterweight to the right-wing Kurz’s national government. 

Vienna, which has nearly a quarter of Austria’s total population and is significantly further left than the rest of the country, often stands in opposition to Kurz’s, especially when it comes to migration and integration policy. During a recent debate over accepting refugees from the destroyed Moria camp in Greece, the Viennese government said it wanted to bring 100 unaccompanied minors from the camp to Vienna, but was overruled by Kurz’s government, as it continues to portray itself as tough on immigration.

Strache, for his part, has another future in mind: Although his new party did win a few seats at the lower district level in Vienna, he announced Tuesday that he would not take up a seat in the district council and instead plans to found a magazine.

This does not mean that far-right ideas are totally unpopular: Even in the midst of the pandemic, 45 percent of voters named foreigners and integration as one of their top concerns in exit polling. But far-right parties like the FPÖ and Team HC Strache are no longer the only ones advocating those policies. Kurz’s ÖVP also stressed those issues heavily in its campaign, advocating nearly identical policies but with less abrasive rhetoric. And at a time when voters are largely seeking out competent leadership—and a break from the drama and infighting common among far-right parties—it’s no wonder many far-right Viennese voters opted instead to vote for a more stable choice with many of the same policies, or chose to stay home entirely. Unless something changes in the near future, they may struggle to get those voters back.