The far-right Freedom Party of Austria gained a realistic chance this weekend of leading the country’s next government, after talks between three mainstream parties collapsed.
The Freedom Party’s ascent would put its firebrand leader, Herbert Kickl, into the position of chancellor and signal a new high-water mark for the rise of the far right in Europe.
Austria’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, was expected to give Mr. Kickl, whose party won the most seats in the national assembly in September elections, the task of forming a coalition when the two men meet on Monday. The meeting could be the first formal step in the path 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 denigrating migrants in Austria as criminals and welfare sponges.
He has called for a temporary halt to accepting new asylum seekers and for 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 by using the word “Volkskanzer” before campaign speeches, which evokes the rise of German fascism.
A senior leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party, known by its Austrian initials ÖVP, announced on Sunday that it would be open to entering into coalition talks with the Freedom Party, despite a campaign promise that ÖVP would not form a coalition with the party as long as Mr. Kickl was running it.
Karl Nehammer, Austria’s ÖVP chancellor, announced on Saturday that he would resign both the chancellorship and the party leadership.
The developments have alarmed observers of Austrian politics.
“The image we now present is to the world, of course, not only a shift to the right but also instability — some people are even calling it chaos,” said Peter Filzmaier, a political scientist at the Universities of Graz and Krems.
Twenty-nine percent of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party. The ÖVP, which has led the Austrian government since 2017, got 26 percent. Until this weekend, it appeared that the Freedom Party would be kept out of government because all other parties had refused to join a coalition with it.
Christian Kocker, who was hastily tapped to replace Mr. Nehammer as the 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. Kocker also said that “if we are invited to talks, we will accept this invitation.”
It could take many weeks, possibly months, before a government under Mr. Kickl would be inaugurated. It would be among the first openly far-right governments in Europe, reflecting how voters are unhappy with migration and economic turbulence and are increasingly turning to the far-right.
Last year in France, for example, the far-right National Rally party won nearly a third of the votes in European Union parliamentary elections, Late in 2023, Dutch voters gave Geert Wilders’s 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 five state governments and was the junior partner in a coalition with the ÖVP in the national government until it was felled by a salacious scandal involving a video of a fake Russian heiress and party leader.
Before that, Mr. Kickl acted as the country’s interior minister, responsible for public safety and migration, among other matters.
Now that coalition talks between the conservatives and progressives have ended, coalition talks between the Freedom Party and the ÖVP might go more smoothly, say political analysts in Vienna, noting that on many fronts the parties have much in common.
Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, said that the ÖVP’s commitment last summer to not work with the Freedom Party had more to do with a strategy of trying to stay the biggest party in the coalition and keeping the chancellery.
“All barriers are now being torn down very quickly — which also shows how superficial this exclusion strategy was,” he said.
