FPO leader Herbert Kickl gets mandate to try to lead a government, which would be the first headed by the far right since World War II.
Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen has tasked the leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), Herbert Kickl, with forming a coalition government after a centrist bid to assemble one without the FPO collapsed unexpectedly over the weekend.
Monday’s announcement marks a dramatic reversal by the president, a former leader of the left-wing Greens who has long been critical of the FPO and has clashed with Kickl, but few options remained for him after the centrists failed to forge a coalition.
The eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO won last September’s parliamentary election with 29 percent of the vote.
It will now enter talks with its only potential partner, the conservative People’s Party (OVP), seeking to lead a government for the first time since it was founded in the 1950s under a leader who had been a senior officer in Hitler’s elite paramilitary SS.
“I have … tasked him with launching talks with the People’s Party to form a government,” Van der Bellen said in a televised address after meeting Kickl, adding: “I did not take this step lightly.”
“Kickl believes he can find viable solutions … and he wants this responsibility,” Van der Bellen said.
As the 56-year-old Kickl left his meeting with the president, hundreds of protesters, including Jewish students and left-wing activists, booed, whistled, chanted “Nazis out” and waved banners with slogans such as “We don’t want a right-wing extremist Austria”.
Van der Bellen had infuriated the FPO by not tasking it with forming a government soon after the election since no potential coalition partner was immediately forthcoming. That task fell to the OVP and its leader, Chancellor Karl Nehammer. The OVP came second in the election.
Nehammer’s attempts to assemble a three- and then two-party coalition with other centrist parties fell apart this weekend, prompting him to announce his resignation.
Analysts have said a coalition led by the far right with the conservatives as junior partners is now highly likely.
Nehammer had long insisted his party would not govern with Kickl, saying the FPO leader was a conspiracy theorist and security threat. With Nehammer gone, so is that red line.
His interim successor as OVP leader, Christian Stocker, said on Sunday his party would join coalition talks led by Kickl.
“We are at the very beginning. If we are invited to these talks, the outcome of those talks is open,” OVP heavyweight Wilfried Haslauer, the governor of Salzburg state who stood next to Stocker at his first statement to the media as designated party leader, told broadcaster ORF.
Should those talks fail, however, a snap election is likely, and opinion polls suggest support for the FPO has only grown since September.
In its election programme titled Fortress Austria, the FPO called for the “remigration of uninvited foreigners” to achieve a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.
It has also called for an end to sanctions against Russia. The FPO is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine, and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.
Kickl has criticised “elites” in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.
The OVP and the FPO overlap on some of these issues, particularly over taking a tough line on immigration.
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