Austria’s far-right FPÖ has won the national elections. Will Vienna follow Budapest since 2010, Warsaw from 2015- 2023, and Rome since 2022 in a path towards backsliding on EU values? Oliver Garner and Matthew Haji-Michael reflect.
On 29 September 2024 the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ)[Freedom Party of Austria] stormed to an unprecedented success by winning a majority of votes in the Austrian legislative elections. Founded in 1956 by Anton Reinthaller, a former member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel(SS), the FPÖ is now one of the populist parties in Europe with the most experience of power. It was last in government as recently as 2019, albeit not as the main coalition partner. Whether victory at the polls can translate into power in the executive and the legislature will all depend upon inter-party negotiations. With Austria’s other parties and even its president vowing not to work with Herbert Kickl, the FPÖ’s current leader, this may prove a bridge too far for the party despite their electoral success.
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If, however, Kickl does manage to form a government – an outcome that is still very possible – what would this mean for Austria’s relationship with the European Union?
Should we expect democratic and rule of law ‘backsliding’, similar to that seen in Hungary, Poland, and Italy under their own respective illiberals, from a potential Kickl government? And what can the EU do to prepare for this possibility?
Die Justiz – The Courts
The FPÖ have hardly disguised their political intentions. Instead, they display their illiberalism openly in their manifesto as a divisive yet effective means to gain popularity. Similarities between their proposed policies and those of other European populists abound. In one striking passage, the FPÖ announces that it ‘can no longer accept’ interventions of the European courts (the ECJ and ECtHR in particular), blaming them for causing ‘socio-political disintegration’. Such rhetoric has also been echoed recently in the United Kingdom Conservative Party’s leadership race following their electoral defeat, with candidates arguing for departure from the ECHR due to the perceived impossibility of reform.
The FPÖ instead favour derogating from decisions of the European courts in cases where the nation’s representatives – by which they mean themselves – disagree, a position they justify by hiding behind a nebulous claim to ‘sovereignty’. Ironically, scholars who advocate UK departure from the ECHR have actually warned publicly against such an outcome of national ‘selective exit’ through non-application of judgments. The sovereign derogations policy would signal a clear intention to follow the path of Fidesz in Hungary and PiS in Poland in challenging the European rule of law structure and the courts which uphold it. Just as we saw in Poland, the FPÖ have brought proposals to establish new supposedly ‘judicial’ bodies to deal with their populist priorities – in the case of Austria under a Kickl Chancellery, this would mean a specialised ‘fast-track aliens court’.
Such courts are more likely to be politicised bodies that serve the FPÖ’s anti-immigrant agenda than genuine independent bodies that uphold the rule of law. One can only imagine the reaction of Austria’s very own Hans Kelsen, famous architect of the 1920 constitution and fierce supporter of judicial independence, towards such bodies.
Far from an attack on sovereignty however, intervention by the ECJ and ECtHR to counter such measures would in fact respect the democratic choice of the Austrian people to make the rule of law and adherence to human rights fundamental principles of their republic. Upholding this collective commitment – which, even should the FPÖ gain some degree of power, the majority of voters have once again endorsed at this election – even in the face of ‘backsliding’, would signal rather than undermine respect for the sovereignty of the Austrian people. Rather than being cowed by the FPÖ’s belligerent rhetoric, then, the European judicial system must instead begin preparing a response to such potential rule of law infringements. A legal dispute arising from an FPÖ government pushing through such judicial reforms even offers the opportunity to build upon and strengthen the precedent the Court set in 2023 in relation to PiS’s judicial ‘reforms’ in Poland. Just as the FPÖ have looked abroad for inspiration in their illiberal program, so too can pro-Europeans apply the lessons of anti-populism from other Member States in order to oppose backsliding.
Die Medien – The Media
Whereas the FPÖ’s legal policy suggests parallels with that of PiS in Poland, their proposed media reforms invite a comparison with the case of Fidesz in Hungary. Their 2024 manifesto promises to end ‘one-sidedness and imbalance’ in the Austrian news ecosystem by means of a proposed re-write of the Austrian media law and a new government-controlled supervisory body that will supposedly work to counter ‘propaganda’ in the media. Similarly, the manifesto attacks the Austrian state broadcaster, Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), for its apparent lack of ‘objectivity’, and threatens to disestablish it by means of redirecting state contracts to private broadcasters.
Far from protecting media freedom, however, such measures may only serve to establish the FPÖ’s control of the Austrian media by means of state subsidies for favourable coverage and censorship targeted against those that dare to criticise the government.
In fact, these plans bear a remarkable similarity to the very strategies that Viktor Orbán used to systematically undermine the freedom of the Hungarian media. This involved a significant reform to the media law in 2010, followed thereafter by the packing of the media regulator with party loyalists – episodes from which Kickl may have taken inspiration. Such ‘reforms’ have been remarkably successful in achieving an outcome that is favourable for the regime – shutting down public debate and securing Orbán’s unchallenged grasp on power, both formal and ‘informal’. Moreover, as we saw in Hungary, merely aiming to repeal these measures in a later, more democratically inclined National Council is not sufficient – the FPÖ’s program of reforms, if implemented, could make it nigh on impossible for opposition parties to have a fair shot at balanced media coverage in later elections. Just as some critics of the Hungarian regime are calling for, the EU institutions (and the European Commission in particular) would have to act rapidly if it wished to compel any prospective FPÖ government to abandon such proposals for media reform should they ever be translated into policy.
Die Zukunft – Stopping the Slide Before it Begins?
The price of a failure to act could be great.
Allowing a Kickl government to implement its illiberal program without an external challenge would only embolden its plans, leading perhaps eventually to a fully-fledged illiberal regime at the heart of the continent.
Moreover, with Viktor Orbán firmly ensconced in Budapest, Robert Fico cementing his own power in Slovakia, and Giorgia Meloni leading a populist government in Italy, an illiberal regime establishing itself in Austria would complete a cohesive and geographically unified illiberal block in the very centre of Europe: a Rome-Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest axis that could re-orientate European politics. The strength and resistance of such a bloc would be significantly greater than any one state individually, making full liberal democracy much harder to re-establish in the region, and perhaps even influencing the direction of the future of the European project as a whole. Populists like Orbán are already rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of a new ally in Vienna, and the first steps towards intra-EU coordination between illiberal populist states has already been taken with the formation of the ‘Patriots for Europe’ group in the European Parliament. The presence of ideological fellow travelers across the Atlantic only heightens the potential influence of such a movement as the United States Presidential election approaches. If EU values are to truly remain committed to a vision of supranational institutions, then pro-Europeanists across the continent will hope that the ‘Patriots’ vision for Austria will remain a mere fantasy.
