A Cordon Sanitaire for Once? Austria after the Far Right’s Election Victory

For the first time in its post-war history, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has won a general election, putting the country’s far-right in an unprecedented position to claim the chancellorship. The FPÖ garnered 28.9% (+12.7), ahead of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) with 26.3% (-11.1), the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) with 21% (-0.1), the market-liberal New Austria and Liberal Forum (NEOS) with 9.1% (+1), and the left-liberal Greens with 8.2% (-5.7). The election represented a significant blow to the ÖVP-Green coalition government, which faced widespread dissatisfaction after its management of the Covid-19 pandemic, the inflation crisis, and large-scale immigration, coupled with accusations of corruption unearthed by the “Ibiza affair” against the ÖVP’s once shooting star Sebastian Kurz. Judging from recent opinion polls, it seems fair to say that it was one of the most unpopular governments in Austria’s post-war history.

What sets the 2024 election apart is not so much the FPÖ’s vote share—after all, Austria’s far-right has surpassed 25% several times before—but its now powerful position on the political right alongside an accelerated decline of the political left. The SPÖ was once a dominant force in Austrian politics. It held an absolute majority throughout the 1970s and won every general election until 2013, with the sole exception of 2002, making it one of the most successful social democratic parties in the world, alongside its Swedish counterpart. The SPÖ has now been in opposition for more than six years. Nevertheless, the combined support for the SPÖ and the Greens barely reaches one-third of the vote today. The NEOS have, at least in part, benefited from this development. But on the whole, the 2024 election consolidates a right-wing hegemony in Austrian politics.

Putting the FPÖ’s Victory in Context

To contextualize the 2024 election, it is useful to briefly revisit the FPÖ’s electoral trajectory in Austria’s post-war history. Before Jörg Haider’s takeover in 1986, the FPÖ struggled to challenge the dominance of the SPÖ and ÖVP, usually hovering between five to six percent. Haider’s leadership transformed the FPÖ into a vote-winning machine by disempowering its liberal wing and shifting from a pan-German identity to Austrian patriotism and a populist anti-establishment stance. In 1999, the FPÖ achieved 27%, just two percentage points short of its 2024 victory. After entering into government with the ÖVP, internal conflicts led to the party’s implosion (Knittelfeld Congress) and a heavy defeat in the 2002 snap election, followed by the formation of the breakaway Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ) under Haider. Despite these setbacks, the combined vote share of the two far-right parties rebounded to 28% just six years later. With the dissolution of the BZÖ, the FPÖ led the polls for a year and a half ahead of the 2017 election. Although the ÖVP’s rebranding under Sebastian Kurz staved off an FPÖ victory, the party still secured a more than respectable 27%. Once again, an internal scandal—this time the “Ibiza Affair,” involving plans to manipulate Austria’s largest tabloid and solicit donations in exchange for public contracts—derailed the FPÖ. The ÖVP capitalized on the scandal to call another snap election, drawing away a significant share of FPÖ voters in 2019. In other words, the 2024 result resembles the far right’s combined vote share in earlier elections, absent major scandals (cf. Figure 1).

Figure 1: Far-right vote shares in Austrian general elections, 1995-2024

Broadening its Electoral Base with a Radicalized “Illiberal” Platform

The far-right’s victory came with a broadened electoral support base. Exit polls suggest that the FPÖ can no longer be considered a Männerpartei (men’s party), having closed the gender gap by securing a remarkable 28% of the female vote. The FPÖ also won among middle-aged voters (37%, ages 35-59) as well as younger voters (27%, ages 16-34). At the same time, the party continues to underperform among pensioners (21%), urban voters (20.7% in Vienna), and university graduates (15%). While immigration remains the primary concern for FPÖ supporters, they are also overrepresented among voters concerned about inflation, the economy and public finances, pensions, housing, employment, and healthcare. This aligns with recent research indicating that far-right voters are increasingly invested in “bread-and-butter” issues like welfare state reform, not just “culture war” topics like immigration and identity.

While immigration remains the primary concern for FPÖ supporters, they are also overrepresented among voters concerned about inflation, the economy and public finances, pensions, housing, employment, and healthcare.

From a programmatic perspective, the FPÖ’s election manifesto doesn’t reference Hungary’s “illiberal democracy,” but its policies suggest that the Hungarian model is one to emulate. In 2019, former party leader Heinz-Christian Strache articulated in the infamous “Ibiza video” his desire to reshape Austria’s media landscape along the lines of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where media independence has been eroded to favor pro-government campaigns. Strache’s successor, Herbert Kickl, has openly argued that “the law should follow politics” and not the other way round.

A similar strategy of agenda-setting can be seen in Hungary, where “national consultations” have been used primarily for scapegoating and fearmongering. Unsurprisingly, Kickl and Orbán have spearheaded a “patriotic” alliance, aiming to unify far-right parties in the European Parliament. More recently, the FPÖ has adopted extreme-right rhetoric by calling for “remigration” policies that would expel “illegal immigrants,” suspend asylum applications, and strip naturalized citizens of their Austrian citizenship for alleged failures to integrate. Hence, equal protection and minority rights would become subject to the political whim of the FPÖ. All of this makes for a textbook example of “democratic backsliding.”

Same old, Same Old on the Economy

Whereas the FPÖ has shown no signs of moderating its “illiberal” ambitions, its economic platform has remained remarkably conventional, focusing primarily on tax cuts. The party also calls for price caps as a last resort when faced with steep inflation rates (e.g. energy, fuel, basic foods), but its main focus continues to be on widespread tax cuts and welfare chauvinism. The party’s economic agenda is thereby couched in a producerist narrative, essentially arguing that tax-paying “makers” need to be liberated from the economic burden imposed by self-serving “takers” (i.e. immigrants and “corrupt elites”). By toning down its self-image as the “Social Homeland” party (Soziale Heimatpartei), the party’s economic stance is clearly crafted as an overture to the ÖVP for coalition talks. Recent research suggests that radical right parties tend to overspend in government more generally, but in Austria’s current economic situation, the FPÖ’s combination of substantial tax cuts with the maintenance and selective expansion of costly social spending categories (pensions, elderly care, health care) lacks any fiscal credibility.

Whereas the FPÖ has shown no signs of moderating its “illiberal” ambitions, its economic platform has remained remarkably conventional, focusing primarily on tax cuts.

Facing a looming recession and growing debt servicing costs, Austria’s economy is likely to experience fiscal challenges reminiscent of the austerity period in the mid-1990s, when grand coalition governments aimed to meet the Maastricht criteria and join the Eurozone. Despite these pressures, the FPÖ has been vague about how it would compensate for the projected shortfalls from its proposed tax cuts. It therefore remains unclear how the party would generate revenues anywhere near the 15 to 20 billion euros the FPÖ would need to finance its tax cut agenda.

In fact, the party’s former Health Minister Beate Hartinger-Klein admitted that her administrative reform during the FPÖ’s last stint in government was never projected to create the promised reduction of one billion euros in administrative costs, widely advertised as Patientenmilliarde by the previous ÖVP-FPÖ government (2017-2019). This brings to the fore the typically clientelist intent of administrative reform in Austria, which for the political right means to replace SPÖ-affiliated labor representatives with ÖVP-affiliated employer representatives alongside FPÖ loyalists in the governing boards of the welfare state. Meanwhile, Austria’s healthcare system undergoes a process that scholars of institutional change call “layering”, whereby the main contours of the prevailing public healthcare system remain formally unchanged while state-subsidized private healthcare plans proliferate on top of the public healthcare insurance. Today, almost 40% are enrolled in private health care plans that provide greater choice and shorter waiting times for patients, which causes new social divisions in health care, probably at the expense of the FPÖ’s own electorate. Notably, more than one-third of low-income voters with an annual income below 43,000 euros chose the FPÖ in this election. In short, the FPÖ’s socio-economic platform contains internal contradictions that the other parties may have failed to exploit.

What Next?

Austrian politics faces a situation of great uncertainty. The FPÖ is eager to form a government with the ÖVP by any means necessary. However, the ÖVP, for the time being, rejects a coalition with the FPÖ under Herbert Kickl’s leadership. It would be remarkable if Austria were to embrace a form of cordon sanitaire at a time when it is surrounded by illiberal governments or emboldened far-right movements (e.g., in Czechia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, and Switzerland). Of course, this scenario is driven by purely power-strategic calculations. By distancing itself from the FPÖ, the ÖVP could retain the chancellorship through a coalition agreement with the weakened SPÖ and, most likely, the NEOS. At the same time, the federal president Alexander Van der Bellen, originally from the Green Party, made clear that he would not want to swear in an illiberal platform with anti-EU credentials.

A coalition with the ÖVP and the NEOS would put the SPÖ in a complicated situation. Haunted by internal divisions, the party’s still relatively new leader Andreas Babler did not gain traction in the campaign. There is a broad consensus inside the party to return to power and keep the FPÖ out of office, but a coalition with two market-liberal parties would require painful compromises that could hurt its electoral prospects. It is clear that Babler’s more radical demands would need to be dropped instantly (e.g. higher taxes for the rich). Once in office, the SPÖ’s arguably most pressing task would be to tackle the creeping “marketization” of Austria’s peculiar public-private health care system, a point that features prominently in the party’s manifesto. A rich body of comparative social policy scholarship shows that once private options gain popularity, middle-class voters become more likely to prefer tax cuts over the improved social rights championed by center-left parties. At the same time, the NEOS in government could create opportunities for the SPÖ to enhance social investment in education and family policies. That said, fiscal strains will likely put the spotlight on Austria’s still relatively generous pension system, a hot-button issue for the SPÖ and its loyal pensioner base. More long-term, the SPÖ faces the problem that much of the lower service class, which may well be mobilized on a social-democratic platform, is excluded from elections in the Austrian context due to tight citizenship laws. Roughly 20% of Austria’s residents are currently not eligible to vote due to foreign citizenship, which disproportionally affects working-class migrants in precarious service sector jobs, a trend that is going to accelerate in the decades to come.

---

Philip Rathgeb is Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the areas of comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. He is the author of How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Strong Governments, Precarious Workers: Labor Market Policy in the Era of Liberalization (Cornell University Press, 2018). He also published articles and co-edited a special issue in journals including Journal of European Public Policy, Socio-Economic Review, and West European Politics.

Image made by John Chrobak using “1 Euro, Austria,” licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International; “Kein Durchgang (22695122077),” by Metropolico.org licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; “2018-02-15 Herbert Kickl FPÖ 8924,” by Michael Lucan licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany; “Dornbirn-FPOe-Bus-Dein Herz sagt ja KICKL-01ASD,” by Asurnipal licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International; “Parliament Building in Vienna, Austria-open day – oblique left crowd PNr°1018,” by D-Kuru licensed under CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.