“We have opened the door to a new stage. We will write this new chapter in Austrian history together. We have internalized that the people come first, then the chancellor. These were some of the first words spoken by Herbert Kickl after his party’s victory in the Austrian parliamentary elections last Sunday. The leader of the far-right FPÖ did not hide his joy at the result, while maintaining the populist tone with which he succeeded in making his party the leading force in the country: first the Austrian people, then the government and institutions.
With this populist rhetoric, Kickl achieved what no other leader of the Austrian far right has managed before: winning the parliamentary elections for the first time since World War II. This undeniable success constitutes added value from the point of view of the political family to which the FPÖ belongs. Kickl achieved this by further radicalizing an already radical political force on issues such as migration, identity politics or foreign policy.
This radicalization has a fundamental basis in the choice of words in speeches. Kickl strategically provokes, consciously crosses red lines, reclaims the words used by National Socialism. The leader of the FPÖ presents himself, for example, as Volkskanzler (“People’s Chancellor”), an expression already used by National Socialist propaganda before Adolf Hitler came to power. The word expresses that the chancellor and the people are, in reality, the same thing. Kickl’s choice to present himself now – more than 90 years after Hitler came to power – before the Austrian electorate is no coincidence.
undeniable leader
Herbert Kickl was born 55 years ago into a working-class family in the Carinthia region of southern Austria. After completing his secondary studies, he completed his military service and then began studying journalism, political science and philosophy. He left university without a diploma and began working for the FPÖ. His biographers Gernot Bauer and Robert Reichler recount in the book Kickl and the destruction of Europe that the now undisputed leader of Austria’s main far-right party introduced himself with the following sentence: “I don’t know how to do anything, but I learn everything.”
At the Freiheitlichen Akademie, an academy that serves as a political academy for the FPÖ, he learned how to become a party official, write speeches and design election posters. He quickly stood out and began to make a career with the team. He did virtually everything within the FPÖ: writing speeches for the late Jörg Haider – former ultra leader who led the FPÖ to its first notable growth in the last century – national deputy, general secretary, federal interior minister. Today, no one can imagine the FPÖ without Kickl, nor Kickl without the FPÖ. He who was historically a shadow man of the party is today its undisputed leader.
He assumed the presidency of the FPÖ in 2021. His party had just hit rock bottom due to the so-called “Ibiza case”: in 2019, the Austrian vice-chancellor and leader of the FPÖ, Heinz-Christian Strache, appeared in a video recorded with a hidden camera in a villa in the Balearic Islands where he met an alleged Russian millionaire who offered to give him a media boost for the party in exchange for granting public contracts . Strache had to resign, the coalition government with the conservatives collapsed and the FPÖ collapsed in the following elections.
From these elections, in which the FPÖ lost almost 10 points, emerged the coalition government between conservatives and Greens which has ruled Austria for the past five years. When Kickl took over as party leader, the world was still debating social restriction measures due to the coronavirus. Kickl then became the main scourge of restrictions and the government: he called for marches against social distancing and vaccination, he speculated about a grand conspiracy of “dark powers”. Austrian analysts agree that it is on this springboard that the current FPÖ began to build its recent electoral victory.
Gift to polarize
Unlike his predecessors at the head of the FPÖ, such as the charismatic Haider or the unfortunate Strache, Kickl displays a discreet profile. He is not known to appear at meetings or parties, he does not like histrionics or unnecessary showcasing. This nervous man with university professor’s glasses is known for his love of sports and mountaineering. He’s not a particularly brilliant speaker, but he has the gift of polarizing. He made it known in the round following last Sunday’s legislative elections: he succeeded in getting the rest of the parties to turn against him. Kickl accused them of acting against “democracy” by excluding his party from the coalition game, essential to forming a new government in Austria.
“Under his leadership there has been a radicalization, above all a radicalization of language,” answers Alexander Schallenberg, Austrian Foreign Minister and member of the conservative ÖVP, to a question from ElDiario.es on what makes the Kickl’s FPÖ so different from Haider or Strache, with whom his party has governed several times in the past. “We see radicalization as a risk,” says Schallenberg, whose party refuses to come to terms with the far right as long as Kickl remains party leader.
It is striking that Schallenberg does not refer to the word remigration (remigration in English), which Kickl’s FPÖ adopted with reference to the radicalization of the Austrian far right. the word remigrationcoined by figures like Martin Sellner of the Identitarian Movement, is the public and explicit commitment to expel millions of people from German-speaking countries: refugees, asylum seekers, foreigners and even citizens with Austrian passports and migratory roots.
It is probably the electoral proclamation of the current FPÖ – and also the AfD – which best demonstrates the ethnic nationalism in which the far-right parties of Austria and Germany have settled, a position which disturbs even other European radical right forces because they border on neo-Nazism. An Austria under the domination of a Volkskanzler like Herbert Kickl, he would attempt to take a path that would be too reminiscent of the darkest years considered banished from the heart of Europe.
