T he wiry, bespectacled man in the down vest, looking like an amiable ski instructor, beams on stage as the crowd chants “Herbert! Herbert! Herbert!”, waving hundreds of Austrian flags. Just after sunset behind the soaring spire of Vienna’s St Stephen’s Cathedral, Austria’s far-right leader Herbert Kickl tells voters they have the chance with Sunday’s potentially watershed national election to “take our country back”. “Five good years,” Kickl promised the audience, with polls showing that his pro-Kremlin, anti-migration Freedom party (FPÖ) could for the first time win the most votes.
“Volkskanzler!” supporters shout, using the “people’s chancellor” moniker once used to describe the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, which Kickl has also come to embrace. Riding a far-right surge in many parts of Europe and taking Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a model, the FPÖ and Kickl are capitalising on fears around migration, asylum and crime heightened by the August cancellation of three Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna over an alleged Islamist terror plot. Mounting inflation, tepid economic growth and lingering resentment over strict government measures during Covid have dovetailed into an 11-point leap in the polls for the FPÖ since the last election in 2019.
It is a remarkable comeback for a party humiliated five years ago after the so-called Ibiza scandal in which Austria’s then deputy chancellor and FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, was caught on vid.