Anyone who didn’t want to understand it until now will have to realize after this Sunday at the latest: the National Council election in Austria almost two months ago was not a slip-up, not an industrial accident. The FPÖ is on a triumphant march that also brought it to first place in the state elections in Styria today. With an impressive 35.4 percent, according to the first projection. And far ahead of the conservative ÖVP and the Social Democrats (SPÖ), who no longer have a common majority. This has never happened before in Styria.
And yet it is no longer a turning point. Because 2024 is the year in which the Freedom Party’s victories became normal – and the FPÖ transformed from a perpetual challenger into a real people’s party.
Of course there are regional reasons why SPÖ and ÖVP performed so poorly in Styria. Their candidates were weak, without charisma, incapable of spreading anything like a spirit of optimism. Poison in an election campaign that was accompanied by bad news about the massive job cuts in the automotive supply industry, which ensured secure jobs and good wages for so many people in Styria and is now threateningly weakening.
The Freedom Party is the fixed point
But that’s just a side story in the narrative of the Liberal Party’s final breakthrough.
Austrian politics: It is now a heliocentric system, with the FPÖ in the middle. The Freedom Party is the fixed point around which everything revolves. Everything emanates from her, all eyes are on her. Everyone orients themselves to it, reacts to it and works on it.
And while the others stumble, while the SPÖ and ÖVP lose their core voters and weaken in internal disputes, the FPÖ expands its power – and gradually overcomes all the weak points that previously held it back.
The Freedom Party used to be seen as a party of frustrated men. Today the blue “gender gap” has almost completely closed, and women are now just as eager to vote freely.
The FPÖ’s clientele? All!
If the FPÖ was ever a rural party, that is no longer the case. Of course, their real strongholds are located away from the big cities. There are areas where the Freedom Party reaches 60 percent or more. But in some of Vienna’s most populous districts, the party also achieved 30 percent in the National Council elections.
And academics? They vote for the FPÖ almost as often as they vote for the Green Party.
So if the question is who is part of the FPÖ’s clientele, the answer as of this year is: everyone!
What unites these people is the conviction that they are facing an abyss from which only the FPÖ can save them. They assume that Austria developed negatively and the future prospects are bleak.
The fact that the FPÖ’s rhetoric under Herbert Kickl has become more radical than ever before, that it is orienting itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal democracy, that it is adopting terms like “remigration” from the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement – none of this deters its voters .
The FPÖ has a monopoly on the dissatisfied and those people who are plagued by fears of the future. Nobody else manages to approach them, nobody can make them a credible offer.
EU, Parliament and Styria
This is the mix that led to the FPÖ taking another step towards the People’s Party this Sunday. The Freedom Party has won three major elections this year alone: EU, Parliament and Styria. Why should this series stop next year?
And that will mean that by the end of 2025 it will no longer be a metaphor or an exaggeration to call the FPÖ a people’s party. Their people will dominate local councils and sit in offices in villages and cities, their members will be elevated to central functions and succeed in works council elections. The Freedom Party will thus become normal, at every level of political and social life in Austria.
This is not the end of the firewall to the right – it fell in Austria decades ago. The FPÖ currently governs as a junior partner with the ÖVP in three of nine federal states. In Styria they could now have a state governor outside of Carinthia with election winner Mario Kunasek.
And at the federal level?
A few weeks ago, Walter Rosenkranz, an FPÖ man, was elected President of the National Council. One of his first official acts: he invited Viktor Orbán to parliament. When greeting the Hungarian Prime Minister, the European flag was quickly removed, but not by chance.
Meanwhile, the ÖVP, SPÖ and the liberal Neos are negotiating a three-party coalition. This Austrian version of the traffic light is still making slow and slow progress. The omens are bad; the failure of the German government has not contributed to the euphoria.
But: All that still stands between Herbert Kickl and the Chancellery are these negotiations.
