This past September I visited the refurbished Wien Museum which covers Austria’s history from the bronze age until the present. Perhaps the most stimulating exhibition was a new one on the top floor that surveys the Nazi era. It’s called “Laboratory of Cruelty.” In its previous incarnation, the museum did not trouble itself to mention the Nazi era, a move consistent with Austria’s presentation of itself after World War II, not as a willing accomplice of Hitler and his henchmen, but as the first victim of the Third Reich.
The new exhibition, by contrast, points out that in 1938 even the Nazis, after marching into Austria in the Anschluss or annexation, were astonished by the avidity of the local Viennese to persecute Jewish neighbors. For Hitler, it was “local boy made good.” Before World War I he was a loser living in a Viennese men’s flop house. Now a jubilant throng gathered to hear him speak about Germany’s great destiny at the Heldenplatz, a large square in front of the Hofburg imperial palace, where the Hapburgs once reigned. The exhibition features a large photo of the event, offering a timely reminder of the delusions rather than the wisdom of crowds. By May 1939, almost half of Austria’s Jews had emigrated (a development forecast by the Austrian journalist Hugo Bettauer in his mordant 1922 novel City Without Jews).
I was taken to the Wien Museum by my friend Thomas Seifert, the co-editor of an intellectually ambitious magazine called European Voices. The latest issue championed the phrase “Make Europe Great Again.” In an editorial, Seifert and his co-editor Martyna Czarnowska note that the phrase might “evoke a certain nostalgia, suggesting a yearning to revisit and revive past glories. However, our motivation is not rooted in fantasies of grandeur or grievances about Europe’s perceived global weakness.” Instead, they hoped that Europe, which has been confronted with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, will rouse itself to conduct straightforward discussions about changes in power, competitiveness and defense in order to take “on a role akin to that of other global players.”
As I visited Austria, however, it was hard to overlook the fact that a certain amount of political backsliding was taking place.The country was preparing for national parliamentary elections. Seifert explained that the far-right Freedom Party was on a roll, though he expressed doubts about whether it would actually achieve power even if it won a plurality in the election.
Seifert turned out to be prescient. In late September, the Freedom Party, led by the 55-year-old Herbert Kickl, won almost 30 percent of the vote, placing it ahead of the establishment People’s Party and Socialist Party. Kickl, who supports the so-called identitarian movement, claimed that he was going to turn Austria into a “fortress of freedom.” He has liberally sprinkled in Nazi-era language into his proclamations, for example, that Austria could use a Volkskanzler, or People’s Chancellor.
The Freedom Party, in contrast to a number of other parties on the European radical right, has a direct lineage to the Nazi era. After Austria became an independent and neutral country in May 1955, the Freedom Party was founded and served as a redoubt of former Nazis. In 1975, an ugly feud erupted between Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the famed Nazi hunter Simon Wisenthal over the Freedom Party. Kreisky had invited its head, Friedrich Peter, to join him in a coalition government. Wiesenthal showed that Peter had been an SS officer on the Eastern Front. The brouhaha foreshadowed the scandal of Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations who ran for and won the Austrian presidency in 1986. It turned out that Waldheim, who had been stationed in Greece and the Balkans during World War II, was aware of and likely participated in Nazi war crimes.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the Freedom Party once more rose to prominence under the youthful and energetic leadership of Jörg Haider who tried to palliate the Nazi era. He referred to the concentration camps as “punishment camps” in 1991, praised Nazi full employment policies and defended members of the Waffen-SS. In many ways, the glibly persuasive Haider, who denounced multiculturalism and immigration, was a forerunner of today’s populists. Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, sought to mainstream the party by presenting it as hip and fashionable.
Now Haidar’s old party (current leader Kickl was his speechwriter) is once more on the verge of power. It remains anti-immigrant but has added sympathy for Russia’s Vladimir Putin to its political portfolio. None of this seems to have deterred Austrians from supporting it.
Despite the election results, there is no real sign that the Freedom Party will succeed in forming a viable coalition government. None of the other parties, ranging from the People’s Party to the Socialists to the Greens, seems willing to join with it. After several weeks of what amounts to a political blockade, Austria’s President, Alexander Van der Bellen, has instructed the People’s Party and the Socialists to end the “stalemate” themselves. The People’s Party has hinted that it might be open to a coalition with the Freedom Party–as long as Kickl is not a member of it.
There is no cogent reason for Kickl to stand down. Instead, he may well prefer to watch and wait as the People’s Party, Socialists and Greens form a coalition government.This would probably mean that the Freedom Party would score even higher in the next national election, rendering it even more difficult to block from power.
Already Austria’s neighbors have either gone to the far-right (Hungary and to some extent Italy – though Italy is also pro-Ukraine) or are heading in that direction (Germany). It is not difficult to envision a Central European axis of far-right parties. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, the proponent of “illiberal democracy” and warm relations with the Kremlin, was greeted with jeers by a number of parliamentarians in Strasbourg, where he spoke about his ambitions for the Hungarian presidency of the EU.
The battle has been joined. If Donald Trump wins the American presidential elections in November, it will further embolden authoritarian nationalists in Hungary, Austria, Italy, Germany and elsewhere who harbor a very different conception than their liberal counterparts of what would make Europe great again.
