Austria’s Far Right Sees a Prize Within Reach: The Presidency

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/europe/austria-far-right-hofer-presidency.html

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VIENNA — In his office in Austria’s grand old Parliament, Norbert Hofer, the man who would be Austria’s next president, presents himself as anything but a threat.

He enters with a pronounced limp as a result of a 2003 paragliding accident. He air-kisses a visitor’s hand. He then spends much of the next hour professing that he is not nationalist and certainly not anti-Semitic, insists that he is too young to have anything to do with Nazism and says that he is no part of any populist wave.

Yet Mr. Hofer, 45, also flashes a boyish grin and can hardly help but betray an extra air of confidence these days. In a year of political shocks, this may be the shape of the next.

Mr. Hofer, a leading light in the right-wing Freedom Party, is counting on Austrians to make him the first far-right head of state in post-World War II Europe when they vote on Sunday, the final act in a yearlong tussle that has turned into a contest to mold the fate of the Continent’s heart.

As the vote nears, he is running neck and neck with Alexander Van der Bellen, a 72-year-old former economics professor and ex-leader of the Greens party in an election that is a rerun of a contested vote earlier this year.

What has changed in the meantime is that populists, who had already taken hold in neighboring Hungary and Poland, have advanced, too, in France and even Germany. The British have voted to break with the European Union. And Donald J. Trump has been elected president of the United States.

Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Hofer said, has eroded any lingering inhibitions that Austrians may have had about openly supporting his candidacy, though that remained to be seen.

“With Trump’s victory, that barrier has loosened a bit,” Mr. Hofer said with evident satisfaction.

The existence of such barriers hints at a lasting stigma around the Freedom Party, which was created by a group of former Nazis in the 1950s and gained political traction under the charismatic leadership of the populist Jörg Haider in the 1990s.

But if Mr. Hofer has foes, he says, they are the misguided politicians who allow jihadists disguised as migrants into Austria and elsewhere in Europe, where his party’s leader sees “Islamification” underway.

In Austria, the Freedom Party regularly leads opinion polls, with about one-third of the vote, easily surpassing the mainstream center-left and center-right parties and raising the once unthinkable possibility that the party will not only win the presidency, but soon head the government as well.

That prospect alarms his opponents. In May, Mr. Hofer lost a presidential runoff to Mr. Van der Bellen by just 31,000 votes.

But Austria’s highest court backed the Freedom Party, known here by its German acronym FPÖ, which had objected to vote procedures, and ordered a new vote for October. That was postponed until this weekend because of faulty glue on postal ballots.

The lengthy campaign has not blunted interest or emotions: Each side sees the outcome as having a larger bearing on Europe and even the United States.

“If the FPÖ takes power, Austria will not be recognizable,” wrote Hans Rauscher, a prominent columnist, in the liberal daily Der Standard last week.

The party seeks a rejection of liberal democracy and is “populist, nationalist, intolerant, anti-European,” he added. “It has the tailwind of successful extreme populist movements in Europe, and now also in the U.S.A.”

In an interview, Mr. Rauscher said the main theme in the election was fear of foreigners — long a Freedom Party staple, and now focused on Muslims — and fear for the future.

Certainly, the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of them Muslim, has played a strong part in the party’s appeal. Before Austria galvanized Balkan States last spring to shut their borders to migrants reaching Central Europe via Turkey and Greece, it accepted applications from about 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015.

That year, 10 times as many migrants, or nearly one million people, passed through Austria, a country of 8.4 million.

As a percentage of the population, “it is as if 30 million people would have crossed through the U.S.A.,” Mr. Hofer said, as he smiled and took a puff on his electronic cigarette.

Mr. Hofer, who has picked up on a previously little-noticed provision that could allow the president to dismiss a government or individual ministers, clearly aims to mold policy. He has visited neighboring Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, and speaks of forging an alliance of Central and Eastern European nations under Austrian guidance.

In the interview, he repeatedly expressed hope that Mr. Trump’s victory will lead to relations’ being mended between the United States and Russia.

Sanctions against Moscow over its seizure of Crimea and meddling in Ukraine should be lifted, he said, “because they have not moved anything politically,” yet “have affected the economy and destroyed jobs.”

Vienna, a neutral meeting place for the Cold War superpowers, should once again host peace-seeking summits and foster economic cooperation with Russia, he said.

“If people and businesses work together economically, there is a greater understanding for the Russian and American and Austrian souls,” Mr. Hofer said.

Opinion polls have seesawed around the 50-50 mark, suggesting that the race is again extremely close.

Mr. Hofer’s opponents are keenly active. Last Thursday, Mr. Van der Bellen posted a video appeal for votes from an 89-year-old Viennese woman who survived Auschwitz and said she was horrified by Freedom Party talk of a coming “civil war.”

Identified only as Gertrude, she recalled seeing her first dead body during the 1934 left-right street battles here and Viennese residents’ mocking the Jews forced to scrub streets with toothbrushes after the Nazis took power.

Mr. Van der Bellen’s campaign said her identity would be kept secret for fear of hate attacks on social media that have already been a feature of the months of campaign vitriol. The video garnered over 2.5 million views in three days.

A TV talk show host, Corinna Milborn, grilled Mr. Hofer last week for an hour over his alleged nationalist views and his calls for undoing the “unjust border” that keeps South Tyrol, a region of northern Italy, apart from Austria’s Tyrol. Mr. Hofer’s grin evaporated and he almost blew his cool.

The next day he lamented in the interview with The Times that “it happens again and again before an election, unpacking the Fascism cudgel” against his party. “It is a pity, because, you know, I was born in 1971 and I hate the National Socialists who are responsible for millions of deaths.”

“There are no extreme-right parties in Austria,” he added. The Freedom Party — whose slogan is “Austria First!” — is center-right, he said, but in any event “to make right-wing politics is quite in order so long as it is not anti-Semitic.”

Daniel Kapp, a Vienna-based consultant who holds American and German passports and knows Austrian and Israeli politics, noted that Mr. Hofer and other Freedom Party leaders had made it part of their strategy to draw closer to Israel.

A shared apprehension about Muslims is one impetus, Mr. Kapp suggested. Another is that it blunts eventual criticism of the Freedom Party if it takes power.

In any case, ties with Mr. Trump are likely to be close. At a Nov. 18 gathering in Vienna, Heinz-Christian Strache, the trained dental technician who leads the Freedom Party, was quite clear about the inspiration provided by Mr. Trump.

“On Dec. 4, the impossible is possible,” Mr. Strache told hundreds of supporters. “We’ve seen it in the U.S., we can do it in Austria. We’re a little cautious here, it’s our style. But if the Americans can do it, we can do it.”