Austria’s Not So Scary Right Turn Voters embrace a young leader promising more competitive politics.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/austrias-not-so-scary-right-turn-1508194869
One day Europe will be able to hold an election without a freak-out over a feared return of the far right. That day isn’t here. So Austria’s election on Sunday, in which voters rejected a center-left governing cartel in favor of a resurgent center-right, has the Continent rushing for the smelling salts.
Sebastian Kurz of the center-right Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) placed first in the parliamentary vote, with early results pegging him at 32%. The 31-year-old has served as foreign minister in a coalition government led by the center-left Social Democrats. Mr. Kurz abandoned that centrist coalition and positioned his party further to the right, especially on immigration after the surge of Middle Eastern and African migrants into Europe.
His strategy worked, especially in pulling voters from the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), the outfit that really gives Europeans palpitations. Leader Heinz-Christian Strache has tried hard but not always credibly to shed the FPÖ’s reputation as a political haven for xenophobes and Nazi sympathizers. At the start of the year it polled at 35%, after its candidate for the ceremonial presidency won 47% last year. But on Sunday its share fell to about 20%
Mr. Kurz reversed the far-right’s march by co-opting some of its main policies. Those include tighter bars on asylum-seekers and intra-European Union migrants claiming social benefits, and a push to shut off the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean by returning most to refugee camps in North Africa. He added an economic platform of tax-rate cuts, especially on individual income to below 40% and a new focus on business-friendliness.
Some of our media friends present this as a resurgence of an ugly far-right party, and Mr. Kurz is likely to form a coalition with the FPÖ. But the FPÖ already has done a turn in a governing coalition, from 2000-2005, and it ended badly amid divisions about economic policy and leadership. The lesson was that voters care about results, and an electorate supporting a fringe party out of frustration won’t blithely follow that party into an abyss.
Sunday’s result confirms that conclusion, as voters came home to a centrist party that now aims to compete for votes rather than taking them for granted as part of an ideologically neutered left-right coalition. That should be good news for worried European politicians. Voters will give mainstream parties plenty of opportunity to reform themselves, but the parties have to listen to the voters.
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