Austria’s far-right Freedom Party received a mandate on Monday to form a new government, which if successful would be the first led by the far-right since World War II.
The Freedom Party, led by Herbert Kickl, won Austria’s parliamentary election in September last year, taking 28.8 percent of the vote and beating outgoing Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party into second place.
However, in October, Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen gave Nehammer the first chance to form a new government after Nehammer’s party said it would not go into government with the Freedom Party under Kickl and others refused to work with the Freedom Party at all.
Photo: Reuters
Those efforts to form a governing alliance without the far-right collapsed in the first few days of the new year and Nehammer said on Saturday that he would resign.
The People’s Party then signaled that it might be open to working under Kickl. Van der Bellen said after meeting Kickl for about an hour at the presidential palace on Monday that he had tasked the Freedom Party leader with holding talks with the People’s Party to form a new government.
The far-right and the conservatives have governed together before, but on previous occasions with the Freedom Party as the junior partner. Most recently, they ran Austria from 2017 to 2019 in a government in which Kickl — a 56-year-old with a taste for provocation — served as interior minister. It collapsed in a scandal surrounding the Freedom Party’s leader at the time.
Coalition talks between the far-right and conservatives are not guaranteed to succeed, but there are no longer any other realistic options in the current parliament and polls suggest that a new election soon could strengthen the Freedom Party further.
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