Austria faces far-right chancellor as EU accepts new normal

When the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) last entered government in 2000, the European Union imposed diplomatic sanctions. Fourteen member states froze bilateral contacts, Belgium floated the idea of an EU without Austria, and the episode became a case study in how the bloc polices its democratic boundaries. Twenty-five years later, the FPÖ is not asking for a junior ministry. Its leader, Herbert Kickl, is negotiating to become chancellor. The reaction in Brussels amounts to a shrug.

How the arithmetic landed on Kickl

The FPÖ finished first in the September 2024 parliamentary election with 29% of the vote, a result that left the centre-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) in second place on 26%. The ÖVP initially tried to build a three-way coalition with the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the liberal NEOS. Those talks collapsed in early January 2025 over budget disagreements, leaving the ÖVP with a binary choice: govern with Kickl or call a snap election that polls suggest would hand the FPÖ up to 39%. The caretaker chancellor, Alexander Schallenberg, an ÖVP foreign minister, flew to Brussels days after the breakdown to meet European Council president António Costa and European Parliament president Roberta Metsola. He promised Austria would "remain a reliable, strong and constructive partner within the EU" and that red lines, rule of law, judicial independence, fundamental rights, support for Ukraine, were not up for negotiation.

What the FPÖ manifesto actually demands

Schallenberg's assurances sit uneasily alongside the FPÖ's own programmes. The party's European election platform, titled "Stop the EU madness", stopped short of advocating "Auxit" but demanded radical treaty reform and an end to what it calls Brussels's "political excesses". Its general election manifesto, "Fortress Austria, Fortress of Freedom", goes further: an immediate halt to immigration, suspension of the asylum system, expulsion of all asylum seekers, a policy that would breach EU asylum law, and a concept of "remigration" that remains undefined but carries unmistakable echoes of identitarian rhetoric. On tax, the FPÖ wants cuts to corporate rates and wage costs. On foreign policy, it calls for an end to EU sanctions on Russia and a halt to military aid for Ukraine, positions that align with the Kremlin's interests. The party has distanced itself from a 2016 "cooperation agreement" with Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, but the document existed and was signed by Kickl's predecessor, Heinz-Christian Strache.

The ÖVP's dilemma: constrain or accommodate?

The central question is whether the ÖVP, as senior coalition partner, can or will act as a democratic guardrail. History offers little comfort. In two previous coalitions, 2000 to 2005 and 2017 to 2019, the ÖVP accommodated FPÖ attacks on media independence, judicial appointments and minority rights. Gabriela Greilinger, a far-right specialist at the University of Georgia, argues the ÖVP has "a history of accommodating the FPÖ's attacks on democracy" and would be "poorly equipped to safeguard liberal democratic principles against a far-right partner that consistently undermines societal norms" as the junior party this time round. The FPÖ would hold the chancellery and, almost certainly, the interior and justice portfolios. Control of the security apparatus and prosecutorial appointments would give Kickl direct leverage over the institutions Schallenberg promised to protect.

Brussels's leverage problem

The European Commission's primary tool for disciplining recalcitrant members has been financial: withholding cohesion funds and recovery payments under the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism. That lever worked, imperfectly, against Hungary. Viktor Orbán's government has been kept "more or less onside largely through withholding EU funds", as one diplomat put it. Austria, however, is a net contributor. In 2023 it paid roughly €2.8 billion more into the EU budget than it received. A transactional threat, "comply or lose your rebate", carries no weight when there is no rebate to lose. "Kickl could fall in line," said a southern European diplomat. "Or he could go rogue. The fact is, no one knows."

The expanding bloc of disruption

If Kickl takes office, he will not be isolated. Populist, Moscow-friendly or EU-critical parties now lead governments in Italy, Hungary and Slovakia. They participate in or support coalitions in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden and Croatia. In Romania, the Czech Republic and France, similar forces are polling strongly. At the European Parliament, the Patriots for Europe group, launched in July 2024, brings together Orbán's Fidesz, Marine Le Pen's National Rally, Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom, Spain's Vox and the FPÖ. The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), led by Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy and Poland's Law and Justice, has signalled openness to collaboration. The European People's Party (EPP), which includes the ÖVP, Germany's CDU and Poland's Civic Platform, has already aligned with the ECR on several votes, drawing criticism that the centre-right is normalising the radical right to fend off its own electoral challenges.

Where unanimity becomes a weapon

The practical danger lies in policy areas requiring unanimity in the European Council: foreign policy, taxation, treaty change, and aspects of migration and climate legislation. A coordinated bloc of four or five capitals, Budapest, Bratislava, Rome, Vienna, possibly Prague, could block new sanctions on Russia, stall the EU's revised asylum and migration pact, water down the Green Deal's 2050 carbon neutrality target, or veto Ukraine's accession negotiations. Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group notes that "anti-EU governments will remain well short of the blocking minority in the European Council needed to seriously upset EU decision-making", but he adds that the threshold for disruption is lower than the threshold for veto. Procedural delays, refusal to implement directives, and the political toxicity of constant confrontation can paralyse the machinery without a formal vote ever being lost.

The domestic pressure cooker

Kickl's immediate headache, if he enters the chancellery, will not be Brussels but the Austrian budget. The country faces a structural deficit that the European Commission has placed under the excessive deficit procedure. Consolidation measures, spending cuts, tax rises or both, will dominate the first year. Rahman argues this domestic pressure may actually temper Kickl's European ambitions: "He is going to be much more focused on budget consolidation, welfare reform and domestic culture wars than on a big fight with the EU." But culture wars have a European dimension. The FPÖ's "Fortress Austria" rhetoric targets EU migration rules, the European Court of Human Rights, and the very concept of shared sovereignty. Every domestic fight becomes a Brussels fight when the legal framework is supranational.