Valentina Ausserladscheider on the Freedom Party of Austria and Neoliberalism as a Far-right Project

Valentina, thank you for joining us to talk about your book Far-Right Populism and the Making of the Exclusionary Neoliberal State. I wanted to start where you begin the book, which is with a survey of the field. As you note, when we hear about the rise of the far right, we are usually offered explanations that are either “cultural” or “economic,” but you take a different approach. Can you tell us a bit about the discursive, constructivist account that you offer and why it is important for understanding the history and ideology of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the main focus of your book?

Thanks for inviting me. I am really happy to be here. In recent years, especially since 2016, the research field centered around two, slightly reductionist, perspectives on the rise of the far right. These perspectives were not reductionist in the sense of being unimportant or not telling an important story, but in the sense that they were presented as a stark dichotomy. On one side, the cultural backlash thesis claimed that the reason nationalist and conservative forces had become so successful was because of a “cultural backlash” against progressive values, cosmopolitanism, and the rise of multicultural values—all of which made people, in this story, feel culturally displaced and worried about their identity and traditions. This theory was dichotomized with older explanations that centered socioeconomic insecurities, and the resentment people feel because they are unhappy with their socioeconomic status.

In the discourse and programs of these far-right parties, you will not find policy positions that are either cultural or economic alone, but discourse that is constructed by combining and intertwining these elements to tell a story about how a nation’s cultural heritage is threatened in part because it cannot protect its economic values.

So, it was very much an either/or story. But in the discourse and programs of these far-right parties, you will not find policy positions that are either cultural or economic alone, but discourse that is constructed by combining and intertwining these elements to tell a story about how a nation’s cultural heritage is threatened in part because it cannot protect its economic values or national economic interests against globalization and all of these forces and vice versa. This is where you find anti-immigration ideas that are bound up with the claim that immigrants take away “our” labor market positions, our resources in terms of welfare states, etc.

So, it is never just cultural or economic, it is very much intertwined. That is the discursive side. However, studies such as Noam Gidron and Peter Hall’s work on the politics of social status suggest that also on the demand side of public opinion, those factors tend to be quite closely intertwined. Of course, you can separate them with survey methods, but when we look into how people make political decisions, it is actually very much on the basis of both cultural and economic ideas. You can see that quite clearly if you listen to people talk about losing their national-cultural identity and immigration. It is never just, “Oh, we dislike immigration because they are different.” It is often, “We dislike immigration because they take something away from us.” And that “taking something away from us” is very often material, it is economic, while being expressed through seemingly non-material identity constructs. The constructivist account really helps us understand these complicated entanglements that go beyond saying it’s either the culture or the economy.

I want to ask you a two-part question that gets to the heart of your book— about your concept of “exclusionary neoliberalism.” On the exclusionary piece, you note that national identities are constructed discursively through notions of “sameness” and notions of “difference.” Can you talk to us about how this construction happens specifically in the context of the far-right’s worldview? Who is the same, and who is different? On the second piece, can you tell us about how this nationalism comes to be tied to neoliberalism and to the way that its principles are articulated by the far right? This seems to be a counterintuitive notion to many people.

Here, it is important to start by focusing on and defining the far-right element. I do believe that for these parties the national/nativist core is really important. Their project is not solely about that, but it is very integral insofar as they define their political identity through the nation-state, and so nationality naturally comes to be bound up with this idea of sameness of the people within a nation. But that suggests an Other and that process of Othering is particularly prevalent in populist discourse. The Austrian “people,” for a party like the FPÖ, are presented as opposed to an Other, an external threat: immigrants, non-Austrians, etc.—the simplest way of weaving discourses about sameness and difference. What I am suggesting is that when we link this tendency to economic ideas, the exclusionary piece becomes even more potent. You can see economic ideas being discussed with, and linked to, something like sameness: we want to build an economy that is beneficial to our people, who are all the same.

Now, nationalism studies show us that this emphasis on sameness is also automatically exclusionary. Nonetheless, I think that when a construction of difference is undertaken, that is where you really see the exclusionary nature come to the fore, in the sense that the Other, the immigrants, are not deserving of the welfare state benefits because they are not like us. They are not deserving of our labor market positions, they are not deserving of our Austrian resources in any capacity. And that is how far-right actors construct sameness and difference and how they then build this exclusionary worldview that I’m describing.

The neoliberal part of the story is only counterintuitive because we often think of neoliberalism as this force of globalization in world markets. If we read Quinn Slobodian’s fantastic book Globalists, for instance, we see that globalization is an extremely important part of the intellectual history of what we call neoliberalism today, but I think that it is only half of the story.

When we look at economic policy implementation, we are forced to look at the nation-state and the national political actors. In that sphere, the story around neoliberalization has most predominantly focused on mainstream conservative actors. We look at Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan—more mainstream actors—because we simply assume that the actors on the margins did not have the kind of power to implement policy change. But in the case of Austria, and this is why I looked at this case so much more closely, the neoliberal project was a project of the far right. Here you can see how far-right actors, who at the time were on the margins of politics—this is no longer the case, they are very much mainstream now—were able to ideationally influence the kinds of ideas that were thought to be possible. This included neoliberal ideas. Thus the Austrian far right was really part and parcel of the implementation of neoliberalism.

Moving on slightly, and this may be quite a crude question, but I wanted to ask you about the parochial dimension of the FPÖ’s relationship with neoliberalism. The schools of thought that we associate with the neoliberal turn are, typically, distinctly Austrian and tied to patriarchs of neoliberalism like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Does this partially explain why the FPÖ can be adamantly nationalist and neoliberal? In other words, does it somehow weaken the tension between these two features when the great thinkers of neoliberalism, whose schools are still the most influential, are part of an Austrian intellectual heritage that nationalists are probably keen to adopt? If so, does this tell us anything about the generalizability of exclusionary neoliberalism?

In my own research, I spent too little time investigating potential connections between the founding fathers of the FPÖ and the liberal thinkers that were active in Austria early. But that is not to say that there is no link. I think it would be an extremely valuable piece of research if it were to be done, to really dig into the historical archives and look for these connections. What I do know is that we can observe intimate connections between the far right and liberal economic institutions in Austria today. For years now, Barbara Kolm has doubled as not only the head of the Hayek Institute in Vienna, but also as an advisor to the FPÖ. She has long been an economic advisor to the party, and she wrote the FPÖ’s economic program for the most recent parliamentary elections. This time, she was elected on the party’s ticket and is now a member of the Austrian parliament. That is about as clear of a connection as you can get.  

So, on the historical element I think more research is needed, but I would guess that these tendencies could be found in the Austrian economics tradition, and I would suspect that some had sympathy for the far right even then. If you look at the think tanks that stand behind the FPÖ such as the Atterseekreis, Austrian-school liberal economics are very much their intellectual core. Atterseekreis is not a think tank that speaks to the broader electorate: its purpose is to be an academic hub for a certain kind of economic ideology. They have reports that come out maybe four times a year, and they run op-eds on Mises and Hayek. It is very clear that the FPÖ’s economic ideology, this faction of it most explicitly, is deeply indebted to these thinkers. This can be seen not just in their early programs from the 1960s and 70s, when the party’s founding fathers promised to present a liberal counterweight to the conservatives and the socialists after the Second World War, but also in recent years.

I wondered if you might comment on why parties like the FPÖ and AfD continue to pursue this neoliberal trajectory while Marine Le Pen in France, for example, seems to be moving toward a more left-ish orientation (economically speaking)? Nothing is monocausal of course, but is it a difference in political landscape, in public opinion, in the role of the left/ the availability of those voters who formerly voted for the left? How can we explain the fact that the European far right is splitting into a more neoliberal far right and a seemingly welfarist far right?

I think it is a bit of all these dimensions. It is always about capturing potential votes. But it is also about party competition, and about what characterizes the so-called political mainstream at the time. I would be really interested to see what happens if Le Pen actually captures power—I mean hopefully it does not happen. In the Austrian case we see that, after the global financial crisis in 2008, the FPÖ (like Le Pen and company) adopted a critical stance toward neoliberalism. As part of their program and in distributed leaflets they came out harshly against two international trade agreements, for example, and even directly criticized the neoliberal worldview. But once they got into power again in 2017, they actually signed a transnational trade agreement, the CETA.

On this question of generalizability, how does the concept you deploy—exclusionary neoliberalism—interact with others? We recently talked to Dorit Geva, for instance, who has articulated this notion of “ordonationalism” to describe Hungary, but there are other terms as well, like “authoritarian neoliberalism.” How does exclusionary neoliberalism interact with some of these concepts and what sets it apart?

I think there are some really important overlaps, and they do describe similar phenomena. However, what I found in the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism specifically is that it almost assumes that authoritarianism is the natural outcome of any process of neoliberalization. If you look at the United Kingdom and Andrew Gamble’s seminal work The Free Economy and the Strong State, there is this assumption that if you have neoliberalization, what you are going to get is more and more authoritarianism, which I think might be a correct interpretation in some cases, but I do not think it is an automatic, guaranteed, progression. I think that there is a much more active component in how neoliberalism is implemented that produces more diversity and flexibility than these accounts assume.

The reason that I coined exclusionary neoliberalism is that I do not think that neoliberalism necessarily leads to authoritarianism and that not all exclusion is necessarily authoritarian. So, exclusionary neoliberalism to me is about the mechanism by which neoliberal policies exclude specific groups of people. This is different from critical notions of neoliberalism that show that any neoliberal market necessitates asymmetries and inequalities that might be understood as exclusionary. What I want to highlight is that in the case of exclusionary neoliberalism, enforced by far-right actors, it is about the exclusion of specific groups of people, which brings us back to our earlier conversation about nationalism, sameness, and difference.

In chapter three, you present a very useful account of the FPÖ’s intellectual development but also its time spent in government, from 2000-2006 and again after 2017. Through this, you focus on a few themes: the discursive move from normativity to normalization, and processes of internalization and institutionalization. Talk to us about these themes. What can be learned about how the far right governs and what this means for the political economy of any given state? As we see the far right on the rise across Europe, these questions are only becoming more important, but the specifically political-economic consequences of far-right governing seem understudied and underappreciated.

Institutional change always starts with the process of normativization—the idea that preceding any institutional change, people have to think that a different system, other policies, or new conditions are normatively a better idea. For that to happen, we first have to know what is problematic about the existing system, policy, or condition. In this sense, I build on Benjamin Moffitt’s conception that populists “perform crisis.” We know from the political economy literature that crisis performance can be very useful for bringing about institutional change. Before coming to power, Margaret Thatcher, for instance, constructed this idea of the “winter of discontent”—she constructed a crisis narrative around the British state and its problems to then offer the solution in her governance.

You see something very similar with populist parties, specifically far-right populist parties. Before the FPÖ entered government for the second time in 2000 (after an impressive performance at the 1999 election) it normativized a neoliberal solution to the crisis it had constructed about the Austrian state. This performed crisis suggested that the socialists had failed to properly govern the state finances, failed to protect Austrian workers against external pressures, etc. So, the FPÖ normativized the neoliberal solution, came to power, and then set about trying to implement their neoliberal solution. During that time, they are derailed by a scandal in 2002, early elections are called, and they lose quite a lot of their vote share. Nonetheless, they end up back in a coalition with the conservative ÖVP. But during the campaign, they essentially run on a platform saying: we have done all these great things for the past two years and we promise you that we will reinforce and build upon these successes if we enter government again, which they did.

That is the normalization of neoliberal policy that I refer to. This ultimately leads to the institutionalization of neoliberalism, because state action catalyzes a lot of path dependencies. So, it is hard to change. I think we see this story play out in other cases too. For instance, Donald Trump, in the 2015 campaign and after his 2016 victory, was all about “making America great again.” But his second campaign in 2020, albeit unsuccessful, was all about “keeping America great.” This illustrates how the far right populist solution is normativized when it is first on offer and then normalized in a campaign to maintain power, to further push the project forward.

On that note, we are conducting this interview shortly after the Freedom Party won the 2024 parliamentary elections, where it secured its best-ever results. In your view, to what extent was this success built on its exclusionary neoliberal vision? You note in the book that when the party fared well in 1999, it was a result of its own “crisis performance” and the solution it offered—namely neoliberalism plus xenophobia. Can the same be said about this year’s results? If so, what were the contours of the crisis invoked this time around?

Absolutely. I think it is very similar in terms of the types of discursive mechanisms that were deployed during the campaign. Of course, in the last couple of years they got a lot of help. The pandemic, inflationary pressures, the slight recession we see in Austria, these events fit nicely into the FPÖ’s attempt to perform a crisis that only they can solve—by entering government and implementing their solutions on exclusionary neoliberal terms.

The pandemic, inflationary pressures, the slight recession we see in Austria, these events fit nicely into the FPÖ’s attempt to perform a crisis that only they can solve—by entering government and implementing their solutions on exclusionary neoliberal terms.

Again, case in point, Barbara Kolm being their economic advisor. I think this tells us everything we need to know about their far-right program. In short, I think that the context we have seen evolve in recent years in Austria and elsewhere makes this kind of crisis performance very effective.

What about the foreign policy aspect? As I understand it, the FPÖ is relatively pro-Russian and cautious about supporting Ukraine. To what extent do you think that the tradition of neutrality (historically very important to Austrians in the post-war era) is playing a role here? Or is it, as foreign policy usually is for voters, secondary? Of course, the closer you are to a conflict zone, the more it can be a sensitive question.

I think that what the FPÖ does on this issue is something that is, broadly speaking, a classically populist move. They suggest that their pro-Russian stance does not only not violate Austria’s tradition of neutrality, but protects it. What really helped them in this specific context is that they could blame the government for how it dealt with the energy crisis (that emerged once Russia invaded Ukraine) by fitting that critique into broader crises it was performing—about greening the energy sector, about the government’s failure to help Austrians struggling with heating bills, etc. As such, the strategy they took was less about a genuine position on foreign affairs, about being pro- or anti-Russia, or about neutrality, and more about reframing these issues on their own terms.

I wanted to close with the question we always ask, which is about the concept of illiberalism. To my eye, your book complicates the conventional wisdom that the far right is somehow antithetical to liberalism. In your telling, the far right’s ideology and political trajectory are deeply bound up with processes of liberalization, most potently in “the economic sphere,” though you keenly refuse to disassociate such a thing from other spheres like politics. In light of this, do you think that a term like illiberalism has utility for describing the political trends we are seeing today? 

I think it is extremely useful. Similarly to what I said about authoritarian neoliberalism, I may not use a term and yet still find it very useful. The same goes for illiberalism. It tells us something about the specific backlash we are witnessing, which can be observed in many places. Namely, a backlash against progressive liberal values. However, one potential shortcoming of some of the literature is that this progressive liberalism that is being backlashed against is not differentiated from the kind of liberalism we see in neoliberal markets, for example.

I think two different dimensions are all too often jumbled together. We have liberal democracies with liberal values and this tends to be automatically linked to the liberal market. I do not believe that this is necessarily the case. We can have a liberal market operating under very autocratic, very authoritarian, governments. The same goes for this notion of illiberalism as a potential backlash against different kinds of liberal formulations, be that political liberalism in terms of liberation movements, be that social liberalism in terms of self-identification, etc. I think it is a useful term and concept, but one that implores us to think about what kind of liberalism exactly is being pushed back against.

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Valentina Ausserladscheider is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic Sociology, University of Vienna, Austria. Her research lies at the intersection between international political economy and economic sociology, and focuses on institutional change, discourse, ideas, and the political constitution of the economy.