The hard-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) has won the Austrian general election. The anti-mass migration and Eurosceptic party – considered sympathetic to Russia in a country known for its nuanced approach to East-West ties – is heading for a win on 30 percent of the vote, ahead of the mainstream conservatives on around 26 percent and the Left-leaning Social Democrats on a little over 20 percent.
In principle this should be a major headache for Brussels – off the back of the FPÖ’s recent success in European Union elections and given the party’s stance towards mass immigration, the EU and Ukraine, including re-migration policies. Still, the EU may be able to breathe a sigh of relief, even if the trendlines for the bloc remain worrying.
For starters, the FPÖ will struggle to find coalition partners, unless it compromises its ideas or excludes its leaders from power. This was the position Geert Wilders found himself in after the Dutch election, while the example of Giorgia Meloni in Italy demonstrates EU nationalists – once in power – often find themselves compromising heavily to accommodate to EU norms.
