32 Time October 3, 2016
A
As recenTly As A couple of yeArs Ago, when
Max Geishüttner was in his second year of law school
in the Austrian city of Linz, he tended to avoid talking
about his support for the country’s Freedom Party.
It wasn’t exactly taboo, but a lot of Austrians still
associated the party with racism, even neo-Nazism.
Its first two leaders, from 1956 to 1978, were former
SS officers, and their successors in the years that
followed were implicated in a series of scandals
over anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. In the
homeland of Adolf Hitler, who also went to school
in Linz, such a reputation seemed an impossible
obstacle to popular acceptance in a Europe that was
supposed to have left such prejudices behind.
“So you would feel, like, a bad conscience if you
say, ‘I vote for the FPO,’ ” Geishüttner told me at one of
the party’s campaign rallies in mid-September, using
the Freedom Party’s German abbreviation. But 2016
is different. Thanks to a broader shift to the right
in European politics, the FPO has become the most
popular party in Austria, with its support growing
fastest among voters younger than 30. Its presidential
candidate, Norbert Hofer, is well positioned to win
a runoff election in December, which would make
Austria the first country in Western Europe to elect a
far-right head of state since the fall of Nazi Germany.
“Now it’s normal,” said Geishüttner.
The Freedom Party’s rise is not an anomaly.
Across the once placid political landscape of Western
Europe, right-wing upstarts have created what
Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European
Commission, recently termed “galloping populism.”
He was referring to movements like the Sweden
Democrats, the National Front in France, the Party
for Freedom in the Netherlands and other voices on
the far right calling for their once open countries
to close up and turn inward. But the insurgency is
not limited to Europe. All the rising rightist parties
are aligned with Republican presidential candidate
Donald Trump in what they encourage voters to
fear: migrants taking your jobs, Muslims threatening
your culture and security, political correctness
threatening your ability to speak your mind and,
above all, entrenched elites selling you out in the
service of the wealthy and well-connected.
In the case of Austria, the man responsible for
harnessing this formula is Heinz-Christian Strache,
a fast-talking, telegenic former dental technician
who took over as FPO chairman in 2005. Back
then, the party’s approval ratings were in the single
digits, weighed down by claims of anti-Semitism
that had dogged its upper ranks for years. But
Strache changed the party’s image. Support for
the state of Israel became part of its platform, and
its new leaders renounced the aversion that their
predecessors had expressed toward Jews. Instead,
Strache focused his party’s hostility on a different
minority group: Muslims.
FRANCE A meeting of the National Front party in Paris on May 1.
The National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, is a front runner for the
country’s presidential election next year
GERMANY A rally for Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the city of
Mecklenburg on Sept. 1. AfD won a surprise victory in a regional
election and is poised to enter the national parliament
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