With just a few days to go before the European parliamentary elections, Austria’s government is in a tailspin. The implications for the rest of the Continent are profound.
On Sunday, Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor and leader of the center-right Austrian People’s Party, called for snap elections following the resignation of Heinz-Christian Strache, Mr. Kurz’s vice chancellor and the head of the far-right Freedom Party. Days before, a two-year-old video surfaced in German media showing Mr. Strache offering government contracts and a stake in one of Austria’s largest newspapers in exchange for Russian support for his party. It turned out that the footage, whose source remains unknown, was a sting operation. But if its goal was to expose Mr. Strache’s cynical willingness to sell out his country to a foreign power with a well-known record of undermining elections, it worked.
When Mr. Kurz brought the Freedom Party into government in 2017 as the junior coalition partner, he claimed — and many believed — that doing so would “civilize” the party, which was founded by ex-Nazis and which regularly trafficked in racist and anti-Semitic tropes. (In 2012, Mr. Strache posted a cartoon on Facebook depicting a hooked-nose banker wearing Star of David cuff links, which he claimed was a critique of “greedy bankers” rather than anti-Semitic.) The argument was that by bringing the far right into mainstream politics, its leaders would have to tone down their radicalism and learn to appeal to a broader section of voters. With parties similar to — and allied with — the Freedom Party on the rise across Europe, this seemed to some like a sensible strategy.
