Coalition talks in Austria have failed, increasing the prospects for the far-right Freedom Party

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party was given a realistic chance to lead the country’s next government this weekend, after talks between the three main parties broke down.

The rise of the Freedom Party would bring its fiery leader, Herbert Kickl, to the position of chancellor and signal a new upswing for the rise of the far right in Europe.

Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen was expected to task Mr Kickl, whose party won the most seats in the national assembly in September’s election, with forming a coalition when the two meet on Monday. The meeting could be the first official step on the road that ultimately leads to a new government.

Mr. Kickl, whose party was founded in the 1950s by former members of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary police, campaigned on a strong anti-immigrant platform. The party has a history of vilifying migrants in Austria as criminals and welfare sponges.

He called for a temporary suspension of accepting new asylum seekers and a law that would ban asylum seekers from becoming Austrian citizens. Mr. Kickl has promised to make Austria a fortress, and his party introduces him before election speeches with the word “Volkskanzer”, which evokes the rise of German fascism.

The senior leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party, known by its Austrian initials ÖVP, announced on Sunday that he would be open to entering coalition talks with the Freedom Party, despite a campaign promise that the ÖVP would not form a coalition with the party as it did under Mr Kickl.

Karl Nehammer, the Austrian chancellor of the ÖVP, announced on Saturday that he would resign both as chancellor and party leader.

The events disturbed observers of Austrian politics.

“The picture we present to the world now is, of course, not only a shift to the right but also instability – some people even call it chaos,” said Peter Filzmaier, a political scientist at the universities of Graz and Krems.

29 percent of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party. The ÖVP, which has been at the head of the Austrian government since 2017, won 26 percent. Until this weekend, it seemed that the Freedom Party would be out of government because all other parties refused to form a coalition with it.

Christian Stocker, who was hastily chosen to replace Mr Nehammer as head of the ÖVP on Sunday, said in a statement to the media that he expected President van der Bellen to ask Mr Kickl to start coalition talks. Mr. Stocker also said that “if we are invited for talks, we will accept this invitation.”

It could be many weeks, maybe even months, before the government under Mr. Kicklom will be inaugurated. It would be among the first openly far-right governments in Europe, reflecting how dissatisfied voters are with migration and economic turbulence and increasingly turning to the far right.

Last year in France, for example, the far-right National Rally party won almost a third of the vote in the parliamentary elections for the European Union. In late 2023, Dutch voters gave Geert Wilders’ far-right anti-Islam Party for Freedom a significant victory at the ballot box, leading to a new government four months later.

The Freedom Party is currently part of the governments of five federal states and was a junior coalition partner with the ÖVP in the national government until it was brought down by a vile scandal involving a video of fake Russian heiresses and party leaders.

Before that, Mr. Kickl served as the country’s interior minister, in charge of public security and migration, among other things.

Now that coalition talks between conservatives and progressives have ended, coalition talks between the Freedom Party and the ÖVP could go more smoothly, political analysts in Vienna say, noting that on many fronts the parties have much in common.

Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, said the ÖVP’s decision last summer not to cooperate with the Freedom Party was more related to a strategy of trying to remain the largest party in the coalition and retain the chancellorship.

“All the barriers are coming down very quickly now – which also shows how superficial this exclusionary strategy has been,” he said.