2024-10-01 18:22:32
Right-wing populist movements in Austria and Germany are increasingly similar. The AfD is adopting tried and tested strategies of the Austrian FPÖ, explains political scientist Monty Ott in a guest article.
It was the year 2008. The future and past of Austrian right-wing populism were facing each other. Heinz-Christian Strache from the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) met the former FPÖ leader and now the top candidate of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, Jörg Haider. Haider was Strache’s role model for a long time before he broke away from him. During the speech duel, Haider was supposed to accuse Strache of just copying him. That wasn’t wrong.
And as we see today, many more extreme and populist right-wingers should do the same. If Haider were still alive, he could probably have directed this accusation at the state leader of the AfD Thuringia, Björn Höcke. During the 2019 election campaign, he clearly copied Haider, who died in 2008: On a poster he sat in the same pose as Haider once did. There is also the saying “They are against him because he is for you.”
The parallels between the “third camp” – as the extreme right is referred to as the third force alongside social democratic-progressive and Christian-democratic-bourgeois – in Austria and the extreme right in Germany are obvious. Where they want to be successful, they copy the recipes for success that were developed in the petri dish of right-wing populism.
The enormous uncertainty in Jewish communities has increased after the state elections in Thuringia and Brandenburg. What conclusions would be drawn if the AfD wins next year’s federal elections? Does looking for parallels to the neighboring country perhaps help to deal with legitimate concerns?
After all, the AfD came in second place in Brandenburg. In Austria, where elections are taking place on Sunday, the right-wing FPÖ is even in first place in surveys.
Monty Ott is an author, political and religious scientist. He studied in Hanover. In his writings, Ott often deals with topics such as Jewish identity, history and culture of remembrance. At the beginning of 2023, his report volume “We will not let ourselves be defeated – Young Jewish Politics in Germany”, written together with Ruben Gerczikow, was published. Monty Ott lives and works in Berlin.
To understand the danger of the FPÖ, one should look at the long list of their scandals. Most scandals revolve around racism, anti-Semitism, conspiracy-ideological whispers, neo-Nazi ciphers and the relativization of National Socialism. One could say somewhat pointedly: That was Haider’s business – and with it he successfully made politics.
And his recipe was so successful that it can once again become a threat to pluralistic, democratic societies today. Haider experimented with the FPÖ. And he continues to shape Austria’s political landscape to this day – through people from his environment, such as Strache and Kickl, who learned from him.
You can see how obvious the continuities are in the area of anti-Semitism when you take a closer look at Haider’s speech at the Political Ash Wednesday 2001 in Ried am Innkreis. One of the FPÖ’s harshest critics, the then president of the Jewish Community of Vienna and today’s interim president of the European Jewish Congress and vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, Ariel Muzicant, has also become the target of scorn and ridicule.
But Haider’s speechwriter had prepared a very special punch line for him, which the right-wing populist shooting star shouted in front of the camera: “I don’t understand at all how someone named Ariel can have so much dirt on them.” He was referring to the detergent. Muzicant sued, and Haider retracted the statement.
Eight years later, Muzicant would hit the headlines again due to a dispute with the author of those lines. Because in 2009, Muzicant compared Herbert Kickl with the NSDAP propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
And today, as federal party chairman, Herbert Kickl is on the verge of the greatest success that the FPÖ could achieve in its almost 70-year history: after the upcoming National Council elections on September 29th, it could nominate the Federal Chancellor. Provided that it finds a suitable coalition partner and that, contrary to previous assumptions, Federal President Alexander van der Bellen is willing to swear in a Federal Chancellor Kickl.