BY ROGER PEARCE

The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has become the latest far-right success story, finishing in first place in Sunday’s election with 28.9%, though a very long way short of a parliamentary majority. Unlike most other insurgent anti-immigration parties, it’s a party with deep historical roots.

Searchlight readers will remember two earlier periods of FPÖ success, even after the party had moved away from ‘liberalism’ towards the far-right.

During the 1980s Jörg Haider (a closeted homosexual with family roots in Austrian Nazism) led a right-wing faction that took over the FPÖ. Very much in the style that has become common in the 2020s, Haider regularly flirted with Nazi slogans while avoiding anything that would make him too toxic with the political mainstream. He addressed notorious gatherings of Second World War veterans, including SS members, and built links with Arab dictators including Saddam Hussein.

At the 1999 Austrian parliamentary elections Haider’s FPÖ polled 26.9% (not far short of what the party achieved yesterday) and he entered a coalition with the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP). Despite being party leader, Haider was too controversial to be given a cabinet post, though for years he retained a power base in the state of Carinthia, where he was Governor for a total of more than eleven years until his death in a car crash in 2008.

By the time of his death Haider had lost control of the FPÖ. After a period of turmoil its next high-profile leader was Heinz-Christian Strache, who had started out close to Haider and in his youth was known to be an ally of neo-nazis in both Austria and Germany.

Strache became a poster boy for the generation of far-right leaders (including Marine Le Pen) who believed that they could ‘de-demonise’ movements formerly tainted by Nazism and fascism. He succeeded in taking the FPÖ back into coalition with the conservative ÖVP from 2017 to 2019. Strache served as vice-chancellor of Austria until May 2019 when a corruption scandal forced him to resign.

This scandal and allegations of financial and political ties to Russia held back the FPÖ for a few years. Their return to electoral success this week is unlikely to see them back in government, because the conservatives will no longer see them as acceptable coalition partners.

This is not only because of their perceived ties to Moscow. Under their latest leader Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ has again adopted racist rhetoric and played with Nazi-era terminology.

Some of these tendencies go right back to the circumstances of the FPÖ’s creation, which built on the earlier absorption of Austria’s ‘national liberal’ tradition into Hitler’s Nazi Party. For historical and religious reasons, Austrian ‘liberals’ were often more sympathetic to Nazism than Austrian conservatives. The first FPÖ leader was a former SS officer and Third Reich agriculture minister, Anton Reinthaller.

In the 2020s, Austrian politics hasn’t moved as far from these Nazi tendencies as some FPÖ apologists maintain, although Putin’s machinations are now an important factor.

It was no surprise to see the UK’s Homeland Party’s online accounts sucking up to the FPÖ. Just a day before the Austrian elections, Homeland’s leader Kenny Smith (a former BNP official with decades of connections to leading figures in the British nazi scene), welcomed an AfD youth leader to his party’s conference.

For the time being the FPÖ distances itself from AfD and prefers to work with Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. But as we are starting to see in the UK, the anti-immigration movement is abandoning all barriers and all traditional notions of decency and ‘moderation’. It would have seemed ridiculous until very recently to imagine AfD officials working with a British nazi fringe group. So it would no longer be unthinkable for FPÖ to do the same.

That’s why it’s all the more important for mainstream parties to maintain a clear line against any alliances or pacts with the far right, whether formal coalitions or rhetorical flirtations. Even without its deep historical roots in Nazism, the FPÖ should be recognised for what it is. A party of racist hatemongers and Russian agents, and a party that has no place in government.