Acceso usuarios
Philip Rathgeb, Martin Gruber Risak
Austria used to receive international attention when the radical right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) gained electoral success and public office.
From 1986 to 1999, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, the FPÖ increased its vote share from five to almost 27 percent in general elections. The subsequent government formation with the conservative People’s Party of Austria (ÖVP) stimulated a wave of street demonstrations, international reactions, and even diplomatic sanctions imposed by Austria’s 14 EU partners—all very unusual in the prototypical ‘consensus democracy’ of Austria. Although the FPÖ imploded around internal conflicts in the 2002 election, it recovered its vote share back to a whole 26 percent in 2017, leading to the formation of another coalition government with the ÖVP. This time, however, the party’s entry in office was met with little, if any, domestic or international political outcry. On the contrary, the FPÖ, it seems, has become a ‘normal’ party in a European context characterized by the rise of similar radical right parties, whose core ideology is typically based on a combination of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.1 Although the socalled ‘Ibiza-Gate’ scandal put an early end to the government’s tenure from 2017 to 2019, its programmatic outlook and policy performance provide us with an empirically observable record of Austria’s radical right in office.2 In this article, we examine an underexplored part of the contemporary debate about radical right parties—labor law and social policy—by studying the policy choices of the FPÖ in government, with a focus on recent reforms legislated from 2017 to 2019.
