(Adnkronos) – Herbert Kickl will express himself in the afternoon on the mandate given to him by Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen to form a new government after the failure of the negotiations conducted by outgoing Chancellor Karl Nehammer.
Less famous than his exuberant predecessors at the helm of the Fpo, the Austrian Freedom Party, Jorg Haider and Hans-Christian Strache, the aspiring chancellor who has long chosen to keep a low profile has thus arrived where they have failed, building a career behind the scenes, slowly climbing the internal hierarchy – he started working for the Fpo in 1995 – making the movement regain the popularity lost with the scandals that later overwhelmed it, with a ‘leap’ from 18% to 27% of the votes in three years, since he took over the presidency on June 7, 2021. Up to the assignment just received, the first for the Fpo, which has already been in government in the past.
The project of the new face, a symbol of the Austrian ultra-right and a candidate for chancellorship, consists of a “fortress Austria”, a “homogeneous” nation, without asylum seekers. He is credited with all the anti-Semitic excesses – recognized as such by the courts and certainly desired – uttered by then-leader Joerg Haider, for whom he wrote the speeches. (follows)
In 2017 he was appointed Minister of the Interior in the coalition government. An experience that closed in 2019 with the Ibiza-gate scandal: on May 17, a video shot secretly during a meeting in Ibiza two years earlier, in July 2017, was released by the German media Der Spiegel and Sueddeutsche Zeitung, in which the then president and vice-president of the Fpo, Hans-Christian Strache and Johann Gudenus, are seen accepting the proposals of a woman who presents herself as the niece of a powerful Russian oligarch and offers funding and support for the election campaign in exchange for exclusive public contracts and a commitment to favor Russian interests in Austria. When the video was shot, the FPOe was still in opposition, when it was published it was in government. The scandal brought down the executive and was a severe blow to the party, which, however, struggled to turn the page.
From that moment on, Kickl began to make his way to the top until he took the reins of the movement and led it – for the first time in the European elections – in the lead with 25.36% of the vote, ahead of the Conservatives and victory in the September 2024 vote. Thanks to election campaigns conducted with slogans on immigration in which the concept of ‘re-immigration’, the deportation of migrants, is used without qualms.
Another point that sees him in a position of total break with the outgoing chancellor is the climate emergency: if Nehammer decided to allocate a fund of one billion euros for the consequences of the bad weather of the weeks preceding the vote of 29 September in the country, Kickl does not hesitate to question the very existence of global warming and defend the freedom to choose one’s means of transport “to fight against the so-called environmentalists who would like to impose the bicycle”. And he would also like to “compensate the people who were forcibly vaccinated during Covid”. (follows)
He proposes himself as the Volkskanzler, the chancellor of the (only Austrian) people, a concept used by the National Socialist regime in its propaganda, which ended up becoming synonymous with Hitler and which appeared for the first time in FPOe press releases in March 2023. Since then it has been part of the party’s repertoire when Kickl is named. A term, recalled ‘Der Srandard’, present in National Socialist propaganda especially until 1933. After the seizure of power, it was changed to Fuehrer and Reichskanzler.
On the international stage, Kickl uses Austria’s neutrality to justify his position on the war in Ukraine. During the campaign for the European elections, election posters appeared on the streets of Vienna depicting a kiss between Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. The text read “EU-wahnsinn stoppen”. Translation: “Stop the madness of the European Union”.
This position allowed Herbert Kickl to remain silent on his party’s ties to Russia. In 2018, the Austrian Foreign Minister appointed by the Fpo Karin Kneissl, danced with Vladimir Putin at her wedding. In 2016, the president of the Fpoe, Heinz Chrisian Strache, went to Russia to sign an agreement between the United Russia party, Vladimir Putin’s party, and the Fpo. Since 2021, the Fpo has officially withdrawn from this agreement. Unofficially, however, ties with Moscow have not been severed.
Now it’s up to Kickl to try to build a majority capable of governing the country. According to an APA/OGN poll reported by Der Standard, 69% of Austrians – against 27% – do not trust the new face of the Austrian far right long represented by Joerg Haider, until his death in 2008. Under his leadership, the Fpo had already entered government in 2000, an announcement that prompted the then Belgian Foreign Minister, Louis Michel, to recommend that his compatriots not go skiing in Austria.
