Far-right wins Austria election, boosting European right-wing surge

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00:00The far-right FPO party has secured a historic victory in the general elections in Austria.

00:06The results on Sunday make Austria the latest in a string of European countries,

00:11including Germany and the Netherlands, to see a jump in support for the far-right.

00:16Well, Armen Georgian, our Europe editor, is with me to talk about this. And Armen,

00:19first of all, why do you think the FPO has achieved such a breakthrough in Austria?

00:24Well, I think there's a mixture of Austrian factors and European factors here, Nadia. So

00:29obviously, geography plays a role because Austria is on a kind of crossroads for migration from

00:35the Middle East and from Africa and also from the Western Balkans into,

00:39from the Balkans, I should say, into Western Europe. And then, of course,

00:43the fact that it has a small population, nine million people, but by EU standards,

00:48it's got a high per capita intake of refugees. So that's allowed the far-right to build this

00:54narrative that, you know, why is Austria being swamped and why are we bearing the brunt of this

01:00and so forth? Plus, of course, the kind of talk we've heard from far-right or populist

01:05parties elsewhere around Europe about communities changing too fast or how can children be schooled

01:12when there are 22 nationalities in the classroom that don't speak German or French or whatever. So

01:17you've got those familiar narratives and kind of specific Austrian factors as well.

01:21And do you see a parallel then between what has happened in Austria over the weekend

01:26and those other countries I mentioned, the Netherlands and Germany?

01:30The Netherlands, I think, is definitely a parallel. I mean, if you think of last year,

01:34that big upset when the far-right won the general election in the Netherlands or they came first,

01:42just as the FPO has done in Austria, there was a similar upset. And in the Netherlands,

01:48other parties did what they could to try and keep out Geert Wilders. He didn't become prime

01:53minister in the end, but they didn't manage to keep out the PVV. And the PVV is in the Dutch

02:00government. It's having a lot of influence. You can see that when it comes to migration and how

02:05the Netherlands now is trying to get opt-outs from European common asylum rules. And similarly,

02:11with Herbert Kickl in Austria, you've got other parties that are trying to kind of keep him out.

02:18Well, one party in particular is saying, maybe we could work with the FPO, but we can't work with

02:24the actual leader because he's too controversial. So that's definitely a parallel with Geert Wilders.

02:29We'll have to see, obviously, how far that parallel goes in Austria, because we have

02:33potentially quite long coalition talks coming up now. One thing that's notable, though, is that

02:39while Wilders did sort of moderate his rhetoric on Islam, Herbert Kickl shows no sign of doing

02:45any such thing of any kind of moderation. Also bear in mind that the FPO does have this

02:51sort of slightly dark past, and it's never had a complete kind of reckoning with the past in the

02:59way that, for example, the national rally in France has gone through what's called this

03:04de-demonization. The FPO in Austria hasn't really done that. And so when you combine that with the

03:11actual personality of Herbert Kickl, you can see how it's pretty hard for other parties to

03:17kind of find a way of working with him.

03:19Interesting story. Thanks very much, indeed, Armand Georgian, our Europe editor for us there.

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