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Europe|As Austrians Vote, Far Right Awaits Its Biggest Success
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/world/europe/austria-election-freedom-party-kickl.html
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The Freedom Party has made itself the country’s most popular party, with calls to bar asylum seekers. It is poised to come out on top in parliamentary elections for the first time.
Sept. 29, 2024, 12:01 a.m. ET
He calls himself the “Volkskanzler,” or people’s chancellor, a term associated with the Nazis.
He has demanded stopping all new asylum seekers to make Austria a “fortress of freedom.” He calls his political opponents “traitors” and has said he wants to put unfriendly journalists on “arrest lists.” The World Health Organization, he has warned, is a dictatorship.
To the growing ranks of his supporters, Herbert Kickl, the chancellor candidate of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, coolly diagnoses the country’s problems and offers reasonable solutions. To his detractors, the former interior minister is a dangerous right-wing extremist who trades in conspiracy theories.
But after Austrians vote in a national election on Sunday, Mr. Kickl may end up as the man Austria’s other parties will have to either work with or work around.
Five years after his party was ousted by a jaw-dropping scandal involving cocaine, a fake niece of a Russian oligarch, influence peddling and a secret video recording, the Freedom Party is back, and is now the most popular party in Austria.
It could come out on top for the first time ever in elections. The party is expected to win 27 percent of votes or more, polls show, beating out the incumbent center-right Austrian People’s Party by several percentage points, and other mainstream parties by even more.
Unlike in neighboring Germany, where the growing popularity of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has set off anxious hand-wringing in the political establishment, in Austria few seem especially concerned by the rise of the Freedom Party.
