“We will kick upwards and clamp down on those who don’t mean well for us”, said Herbert Kickl in May 2023. Under Kickl’s leadership, the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) has scored its biggest election victory since it was founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, an Austrian Nazi who had served as a lieutenant general in the SS. Not only is the FPÖ now more popular than ever, it is also at the height of its radicalism.
The FPÖ’s victory in Sunday’s national elections is being celebrated by far-right movements and influencers across Europe. No wonder: it demonstrates how successful they have been at normalising and internationalising their extreme ideologies, conspiracy myths and policy proposals.
Many of the FPÖ’s ideas have been inspired by Generation Identity, a pan-European white nativist movement that has its roots in France and is particularly strong in Austria. In a post-election livestream to his followers, the movement’s Austrian leader, Martin Sellner, celebrated the FPÖ win as “a dream result” . He has been one of the most influential proponents of the term “remigration” (the policy of mass deportation of people with a migration background), which had its first spike on social media following a 2014 extreme-right meet-up in France.
Ten years later, the FPÖ is far from the only far-right political party that has embraced the concept. Germany’s AfD party used “remigration” as part of its campaigns for regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia on 1 September, and Donald Trump recently called for “remigration” in a post about “illegal migrants” on X. Even though Sellner communicated with and received a donation from the Christchurch shooter who later killed 51 people in two consecutive mosque attacks in New Zealand in 2019, Kickl has since described the identitarian movement as “a project worthy of support”, which should be viewed as an “NGO from the right”.
A year before the Christchurch attack, Sellner wrote to me in a direct message on Twitter: “I don’t think that my videos and speeches incite violence. The anger is there in any case and I think it has its material basis.”
Immigration is only one of the FPÖ’s controversial campaign topics. Covid conspiracy myths, climate change denial, anti-feminism and anti-LGBTQ+ discourse are other features of the party’s branding. The FPÖ member of parliament Michael Gruber recently shared an election campaign video on Instagram that showed him throwing a rainbow flag in a bin with the tagline “Cleaning up for Austria”.
With Kickl using dogwhistles such as “climate communism” and “WHO dictatorship”, the FPÖ has been able to expand its support base among conspiracy theorists and Covid deniers. What does Kickl mean by kicking upwards, for example? He promised to become an FPÖ chancellor “who won’t bow down to the EU, Nato and the WHO”. In a new year’s speech he spoke of his long “wanted list”, which includes centrist politicians whom he refers to as “politicians of the system” (Systempolitiker) and whom he accuses of “treason against the people” (Volksverrat) – two terms known for their use by Adolf Hitler.
A key to FPÖ’s success has been the growing landscape of alternative, hyper-biased and conspiratorial news outlets that have formed around the party and its sympathisers. In the run-up to the election, a series of false claims spread in a chain reaction across these alternative media websites and social media channels such as Telegram. Reports, for example, were circulated claiming that the “deep state” wanted to steal the FPÖ’s victory or that centrist parties were planning to reintroduce mandatory vaccinations after the elections. AUF1, a particularly influential new rightwing channel, has aired ideas of “vaccine mass extermination” and a “deadly transhumanist agenda”. The channel was the first outlet to feature an appearance by Kickl on Sunday night after the election victory.
The FPÖ’s historic victory not only poses a risk to Austria’s minorities, independent media outlets, scientific community and democratic institutions, it also has the potential to significantly strengthen the far right in Europe and internationally. Alice Weidel of the German AfD, Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom party all enthusiastically congratulated the FPÖ. “The Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, France, Spain, Czech Republic and today Austria! We are winning! Times are changing,” commented Wilders on X.
Despite the far-right populists’ focus on ultra-nationalism, their own networks are remarkably transnational. This global anti-globalism is not the only inconsistency in the far right’s ideology. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would be amusing that FPÖ is criticising the “corrupt mainstream media” while they were the ones who were caught wanting to sell Austria’s largest newspaper Kronen Zeitung to a Russian investor to push pro-FPÖ messaging in 2017. In addition, while Kickl publicly described the Covid vaccinations as “a genetic engineering experiment”, he was rumoured to have been secretly vaccinated against Covid (which he still denies). For a party that ordered a raid of the country’s intelligence agency BVT in 2018 and advocates policies that fundamentally contradict the pillars of the Austrian constitution, it also requires a lot of audacity to describe all other parties as anti-democratic.
As I argued in the Guardian last year, extremism has leaked into mainstream politics. With the global rise of an increasingly emboldened far right, it is more important than ever that other parties show that they are honest with their voters and can reliably translate words into action. We need a new generation of boundary-crossing leaders who can offer effective, but non-hateful solutions to the various sources of anger in previously underrepresented population groups. They must be capable of reversing the cumulative radicalisation that is threatening to break our democracies.
Julia Ebner is an Austrian academic and author who leads the Violent Extremism Lab at the University of Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion. She is also a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and author of The Rage, Going Dark and Going Mainstream
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