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‘FPÖ verhindern’( Block the FPÖ) – for decades this has been the slogan of left and left liberal parties in Austria. The results of the National Assembly elections show once again that right-wing forces cannot be defeated in this way.

The right-wing extremist FPÖ took first place in Austria’s National Assembly elections. With 28.8% the party – founded in 1955 as a gathering point for former Nazis – achieved its historically best result. Two days before the election top FPÖ politicians participated in a funeral at which an SS allegiance song was sung. The incident was one of many similar scandals which can no longer damage the FPÖ. People seem to have gotten used to such transgressions. Within the party itself there were not even any appreciable attempts to distance itself.

For Austria’s left the results are a catastrophe. Not just because the FPÖ’s win is so strong but also because the left did was unable to offer an alternative. Under Andreas Babler, the SPÖ’s programme was more left than it has been in decades, yet it landed in third place with 21.1%. The KPÖ too scored below expectations. For the party this is the best electoral result since 1962 but at the same time, at 2.4%, it fell well short of the 4% needed to enter parliament. The parliamentary left has never been as weak since 1945.

At the same time, the issues before the public were completely advantageous for left parties. At 44% the increased cost of living was the most important issue. Immigration was only second, and health and care third. Those who had followed the electoral campaign in the final weeks and months would have to think that Austrians are only interested in immigration. The talk was of ‘street battles’ by immigrant youth or apparent anti-terrorist action after a cancelled Taylor Swift concert. ÖVP head Nehammer and FPÖ chair Kickl seemed to outdo themselves in demonstrating who was the most zealous racist opponent of immigration. Left parties were unable to break dominance of this issue.

From the local to the national KPÖ

Many leftists, communists, and socialists set great hopes in the KPÖ. After successful electoral campaigns in Styria, in Salzburg, and in Innsbruck its chances were better than they had been in decades: It was the first time in 65 years that a party to the left of the SPÖ might be able to enter parliament. That it did not happen shows that the party still needs to find answers to open strategic questions.

At the Salzburg city council elections in March the KPÖ could reach 23% because it was able to make its issue of affordable housing into a decisive electoral issue. In the end even the FPÖ saw itself forced to take up the issue. In Innsbruck too the housing question was crucial to the party’s entry into the city council. This is understandable, as Salzburg and Innsbruck are Austria’s most expensive cities. The housing shortage is more strongly felt there than in the rest of the country.

However, it is far more difficult to become a national ‘tenant’s party’. In 2023 only 43.7% of Austrians were rent-paying tenants; thus for more than half the country’s people this issue matters less, if at all. Outside of the cities, therefore, the KPÖ has to work to get the trust of the population with other social issues. In short, it needs to show that it can not only carry out effective municipal and regional policies but is also a left force to be reckoned with at the federal level.

That this currently is not working was shown by the results in the strongholds the KPÖ had in the regional elections. In Graz and the city of Salzburg the party got around 6%, which although above average remains clearly below the results of the regional and municipal elections. How the party can transfer its successful local model to the national level will be its biggest task for the coming years.

No one needs an SPÖ ‘for democracy’

The SPÖ is in another position, for it is forced to hear the accusation that Andreas Babler’s project has failed. Here the main problem is still the SPÖ’s structure which torpedoes a left candidate from inside. Babler did not proceed strongly enough against these internal party opponents, and he gave in where he – as the former mayor of Traiskirchen, the locality with the largest refugee accommodation in Austria – should not have given in: immigration. In June he committed to deporting ‘the most dangerous criminals’ to Syria or Afghanistan. With this he broke his promise to carry out another kind of immigration policy, which had always been part of his persona.

At the same time he failed to project his own issues. In part this is due to Austria’s media apparatus which prefers to report on internal party conflict rather than substantive debates. This is why Babler critics from his own party, like Hans-Peter Doskozil from Burgenland or Georg Dornauer in Tyrol get so much attention. Even in the midst of the electoral campaign quarrels were conducted publicly. When a Doris Bures – the second National Assembly president (for the SPÖ) and one of the party’s most important women – writes an email four weeks before the election in which she criticizes Babler’s programme, she knows what she is doing. It was clear to her that this email would end up being made public.

As a result the party could only have one issue around which everyone could unite: we are against the right and for democracy – the very issue with which the SPÖ has for decades now lost votes from one election to the next. Such warnings about the end of democracy are pointless; by being ‘against the right’ you certainly get the approval of your own people but you cannot construct political majorities that way.

There are voters in this country who have never experienced how their living conditions have been improved through left policies. Only people above 50 can talk from their own experience about the reduction in working hours and the progressive women’s policies of the social democratic era under Bruno Kreisky. It is precisely young people today who know only one world, in which the only political project is to ‘block Black-Blue’.^[1] It is the world of 2016 when Norbert Hofer was prevented from becoming the first FPÖ federal president, only to pave the way a year later for an FPÖ – ÖVP coalition under Heinz-Christian Strache and Sebastian Kurz. It is the world in which the FPÖ destroyed itself in 2019 through Ibiza,^[2] to then become, five years later, the strongest force in this country.

This politics of ‘being against’ is part of the problem. The left’s claim must always be to make a difference in the daily life of people. The KPÖ managed to do this at the local level, but at the national level it needs to show greater strength. For the SPÖ, on the other hand, it is its own party apparatus that most stands in the way of its being seen once again as a force capable of action. But to change things in the next years in a positive direction we will need both parties.

References:

[1] Black is the colour of the centre-right party (ÖVP) and blue of the FPÖ.
[2] In a sting operation, Strache was caught on video, among other things, promising to sell off Austrian assets to someone posing as the daughter of a Russian oligarch.

Magdalena Berger is Assistant Editor at JACOBIN Magazine.

transform! europe is a network of 38 European organisations from 22 countries, active in the field of political education and critical scientific analysis, and is the recognised political foundation corresponding to the Party of the European Left (EL).  This cooperative project of independent non-profit organisations, institutes, foundations, and individuals intends to use its work in contributing to peaceful relations among peoples and a transformation of the present world.

The article was originally published in German on the website of Jacobine magazine.