Austria’s far-right leader Herbert Kickl has demanded expedited talks “with no tricks” to form a stable government in the national interest.
Some 100 days after his Freedom Party (FPÖ) topped the poll in a general election, Mr Kickl told journalists in Vienna he was ready to enter talks with the centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP).
“I have decided for the sovereign, shared path and sovereign responsibility, because it’s important that Austria doesn’t waste any [more] time,” he said.
Until last weekend the ÖVP, Austria’s outgoing senior coalition party, declined to work with Mr Kickl or his populist FPÖ.
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Mr Kickl said he “didn’t think he had heard right” when he learned of the ÖVP change of mind following the collapse of talks on an alternative coalition led by that party at the weekend.
On Monday, Austria’s president Alexander Van der Bellen gave the FPÖ leader a mandate to seek a parliamentary majority. Mr Kickl told journalists he accepted the mandate even though – given his party’s eight-point leap in polls since September – he had political alternatives.
“Fresh elections would have been a secure thing, and I am confident that [we] would have been able to translate current poll numbers into election votes,” he added.
The 56-year-old said “being chancellor was not my life’s dream” but that he was “reaching out” in the national interest to the ÖVP, with which his party has governed twice at federal level, but not with the far-right party in the lead role.
However, Mr Kickl made clear that times had changed and the roles had reversed with the ÖVP now a possible junior coalition partner.
The ÖVP‘s U-turn in favour of talks with Mr Kickl has divided Austria’s previously dominant centre-right party, with one camp inside the ÖVP still bitterly opposed to the alliance.
In a nod to this very public rift, Mr Kickl said he needed a united and stable negotiation partner to ensure coalition talks with “no games, no tricks, no sabotage, obstruction or politics for the sake of power”.
“If that cannot be guaranteed, then that’s that,” he said, adding that his party was prepared for fresh elections.
The prospect of a Kickl/FPÖ-led government has sparked alarm in other Austrian political parties. Social Democrat leader Andreas Babler described the FPÖ leader as “a danger”. “You can’t have a democratic state with Kickl,” he added.
The FPÖ leader declined to go into details on how he planned to reconcile his party’s policies with those of the ÖVP, particularly on fiscal and EU politics.
Instead he promised a “fresh start” for Austrian politics based on “common sense, focus on the important things, a healthy patriotism and love of freedom”.
Political analyst Thomas Hofer suggested the ÖVP, after its own failed coalition talks, cannot risk fresh elections and is damned to succeed in talks with the FPÖ. He told ORF public television: “The ÖVP cannot afford anything else now.”
In its “Austria First” 2024 election programme, the FPÖ promised to transform Austria into a “fortress” against immigration and related dangers.
It also vowed to defend freedom and Europe’s Christian roots, and promoted family as “a partnership between a man and a woman with common children”.
Austria was “not a country of immigration”, the party said, and wanted an EU of nations and peoples, not of institutions and integration that “forced multiculturalism, globalisation and mass immigration”.
“Our goal has to be to carve out the healthy seed of asylum from the rotten fruit of mass migration,” said Mr Kickl at the FPÖ manifesto launch. “All are looking on, letting this irregular migration happen ... and we are going ever further into this negative spiral.”
The FPÖ finished first in the September 29th election with more than 28 per cent of the vote, only to be initially excluded by Austria’s president from coalition talks because no other party would work with it.
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