After two years heading Graz city hall, Communist Elke Kahr was recently named the world’s best mayor. Now, her Communist Party is hoping to win power in Salzburg and show that Austria isn’t doomed to turn to the far right.
B | arely five years ago, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) found itself mired in a crisis with no end in sight. Things had started to go wrong in May 2019, when the press obtained hidden-camera footage of FPÖ chairman and federal vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache apparently drunk and high on cocaine during a vacation in Ibiza. He was shown promising political favors to a Russian heiress (actually an actress involved in a sting operation) if she bought Austria’s biggest tabloid and turned it into a mouthpiece for his party. Within twenty-four hours of the video being released, it had brought down the federal government — a coalition between the FPÖ and the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) — and forced Strache’s resignation from all political functions. Now lacking its star, the FPÖ was exposed as at least as corrupt as the “establishment” it loves to criticize — and that fall, it lost almost 10 percentage points in a snap national election. In ensuing months, the far-right party suffered yet more electoral defeats on the state level and descended into infighting.
One pandemic and one massive inflationary wave later, the FPÖ’s self-inflicted crisis feels like ancient history. In 2024, Salzburg (population 155,000) and Innsbruck (population 130,000), Austria’s fourth- and fifth-largest cities respectively, are set to hold elections, as are the states of Styria (population 1.25 million) and Vorarlberg (population 400,000). On top of all that, there will also be two national elections — in June for the European Union (EU) parliament, and likely in September for Austria’s national parliament. Particularly on the national level, the FPÖ’s prospects couldn’t be better as Austria heads into its mega election year.
For months, FPÖ chairman Herbert Kickl has stood atop all polls, which have only varied on how wide his margin of victory will be. Though he may lack the charisma of a Strache or a Jörg Haider, the New Right pioneer who transformed the FPÖ from a “national liberal” to an ethnonationalist party back in the 1980s, Kickl’s party currently hovers around 30 percent nationally. In contrast, the ÖVP and the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) struggle to break out of the low 20s, while the left-liberal Greens and the libertarian NEOS sit at about 10 percent.
read more: https://jacobin.com/2024/02/austria-communists-elections-far-right/
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