Meet the Putin-friendly populists on brink of power

Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl is poised to head Austria’s first hard-Right’s government since the Second World War

The man who could become Austria’s first hard-Right leader in its postwar history cuts an unassuming figure as he takes to a stage beneath St Stephen’s cathedral.
Wearing thick-rimmed spectacles and a navy gilet, Herbert Kickl speaks softly as he greets an audience of several hundred Austrians, hemmed into Vienna’s Stephansplatz square by police to keep them separate from a Left-wing counter protest.
“On Sunday, together we will achieve something in this country that’s never been seen before,” the 55-year-old tells the crowd, which has spent the past two hours cheering and dancing as a silver-haired band warmed them up with rock anthems. “Freedom in first place and a Freedom chancellor.”
The latest polls suggest Mr Kickl’s Freedom Party of Austria [FPO] will win Sunday’s election, potentially putting a hard-Right, anti-migrant movement in charge of the EU member state for the first time.
One of Europe’s oldest hard-Right parties, the FPO was founded in 1956 and initially led by Anton Reinthaller, a former Nazi minister and SS cavalry inspector.
Much like the Alternative für Deutschland [AfD] party in Germany, the FPO has sought to clean up its image in recent years but still faces accusations of flirting with extremist or neo-Nazi concepts. While there were no fascist or skinhead types in clear sight at the rally in Stephansplatz, a TV crew was physically harassed by two FPO supporters in the middle of a live broadcast.
Many of the FPO’s policies will pose a major headache for the EU as populism sweeps across the east, above all its calls for “remigration” of asylum seekers and its rejection of support for Ukraine. Though Austria is one of the EU’s smaller states, with a population of nine million and an economy similar in size to Ireland, it wields a veto over key EU legislation.
The concept of “remigration” is openly discussed by the FPO even though it has become controversial in neighbouring Germany, where it is closely associated with neo-Nazi extremism.
Last year the most prominent advocate of remigration, Austrian far-Right activist Martin Sellner, discussed the concept as a model for Germany at a secretive meeting near Berlin that was also attended by members of the AfD, prompting massive nationwide protests.
“I don’t know what’s so bad about that word,” Mr Kickl says of his own remigration plan, which envisages the deportation of asylum seekers, in particular criminals, as well as blocking family reunification for migrants already in Austria. “Those who clapped their welcome in 2015 [the height of the Syrian refugee crisis] have gotten us into a mess that will take decades to clean up,” he says.
Mr Kickl then turns his ire to Karl Nehammer, Austria’s outgoing centre-Right chancellor, and the other main party leaders. He brands their climate change policies, support for Covid-era restrictions and sanctions on Russia as “crazy…those responsible want to sneak away, but I will not let them get away with it”.
“The topic of integration and migration has really taken centre stage as the main political topic, and it has helped the FPO become stronger,” says Judith Kohlenberger, a senior analyst at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
“What specifically can be attributed to Herbert Kickl is a very radical kind of rhetoric. When he was just a party functionary, and not leader, he already wrote all the speeches for [long-time FPO leader] Jorg Haider,” she says.
“He designed all the posters, all these strong, very xenophobic mottos that you read, this is all his doing,” she adds, alluding to past poster scandals such as the slogan “Heimat-Liebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe [Patriots, not thieving Morrocans].”
In addition to a surge in migration, Austria was wracked by severe flooding earlier this month, which killed five people, and its cost of living crisis grinds on despite the government announcing a €6bn (£5bn) funding package in 2022.
One Austrian innkeeper famously resorted to raising the cost of wiener schnitzel, Vienna’s famous dish of pan-fried veal cutlets, from €24 to €149, claiming it would help him cover his electricity bills. The increased price would only be charged to employees of energy companies, he said at the time.
Even if the FPO emerges as the winner on Sunday night, Mr Kickl faces an uphill struggle to secure the role of chancellor, as he would still need to form a coalition.
Mr Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party [OVP], polling in second place, has ruled out serving in a coalition under Mr Kickl as Chancellor, claiming he is too radical.
Much of the controversy surrounding Mr Kickl relates to his 2018 comment that Austrian authorities should “concentrate asylum seekers in one place”, which was interpreted as an allusion to Nazi concentration camps, though he denies this.
But relations between the two parties were already sour, with the FPO previously serving as the junior partner in two brief coalitions with the OVP. The first collapsed in 2002 amid FPO in-fighting and the second was torpedoed by the Ibiza affair, a complex corruption scandal involving then FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache.
Mr Strache had been caught in a sting operation where he was filmed in Ibiza in 2017 meeting a woman, who posed as the niece of a top Russian businessman and potential buyer of an Austrian tabloid, to discuss swapping government contracts for positive coverage of the FPO.
Mr Strache was at that time vice-chancellor of Austria, but the scandal triggered his own resignation, a no-confidence vote in Sebastian Kurz, OVP chancellor, and the demise of their ill-tempered coalition.
It is not the only Russia-linked row to hit the FPO, which has also drawn fire for a poster depicting Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, kissing Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission chief, with the caption “stop the EU madness”.
And in 2018, Karin Kneissl, who was nominated by the FPO as foreign minister, was filmed dancing a waltz with Vladimir Putin at her own wedding. She has since moved to St Petersburg to set up a think tank.
Back at the rally in Stephansplatz, beneath Vienna’s 12th-century Romanesque cathedral, some voters said the FPO was the only party with a concrete solution to mass migration.
“It’s a patriotic party that loves democracy, and he’s a patriotic man who is doing the best for Austria,” Leopold Eisenheld, 45, said of the FPO leader. “The borders need to be closed and we need to see no more migration.”