Austria went to the polls last Sunday. 

The Freedom Party came first, nearly doubling its share of the vote since the 2019 federal election to 29 per cent. Its victory was even more notable for the support the party received from Austria’s young voters. 

The People’s Party, a very distant cousin to the UK’s Conservative Party, while losing an impressive third of its support, came second with 26 per cent of the votes. 

The parties of the Left fared badly, losing around 13 per cent of their support in aggregate to 38 per cent of all ballots. 

On that side of the fence, the Greens were the biggest losers, haemorrhaging more than 40 per cent of the support they had garnered in the pre-Covid world of 2019.

The turn-out was high at close to 80 per cent (for comparison, Britain’s was about 60 per cent). 

The results were a resounding victory for parties of a more traditionalist hue. The people of Austria are tilting in big numbers towards a broadly defined good old-fashioned view of the world, on crime, social issues, borders, freedoms, the economy, the European Union and more. 

A coalition, then, between the Freedom Party and the People’s Party would seem the most commonsensical outcome, allowing both parties to wallow in the warm embrace of their people. 

Kickl, the leader of the Freedom Party, stood on the ticket to fight, among other things, against the “woke madness” — promising to enshrine in the Austrian constitution that there are only two genders. 

He also stood on the side of civil liberties during the COVID pandemic. Austria had gone further than most other countries in making it a crime not to be vaccinated. 

He is also very firm on borders and cultural issues. Indeed, if your national meal consists of pig meat helped down by steins of cold beer, carried around by the dozen in the arms of buxom ladies yodelling in traditional dresses, it is unsurprising that ever growing numbers of chaps for whom pig meat, alcohol and independent singing ladies are anathema would be a serious issue. This point was made for Kickl last month when a Taylor Swift concert had to be cancelled “as three people were arrested in connection with allegedly planning attacks inspired by the Islamic State group.”

On international affairs, the Freedom Party is Eurosceptic and supportive of Austria’s constitutional guaranteed neutrality, in particular on the topic of Russia. 

Russian gas represents 95 per cent of Austria’s consumption, as pipelines from the Russian bear are not officially banned in the country. This arrangement, however, developed under an administration of supposed Austrian hawks on the topic of Russia. On this, Kickl cannot rightfully be blamed. 

On the macroeconomic side, the mood music is rather sombre. 

Austria has flatlined over the last couple of years, having flirted with recession, with 2025 growth numbers expected to bring little relief at 1.6 per cent. 

Inflation up to September 2024 averaged 3.3 per cent for the year, peaking at over 11 per cent last year, way above economic growth suggesting a general impoverishment of the population. 

All in all, though, the advance of the Freedom Party has been steady over the decades. 

Over the last 40 years, the party has been in coalitions with socialist and conservatives alike. 

In 1983, Alfred Sinowatz, the Socialist Chancellor, brought Norbert Steger as a junior partner into the Austrian government. At the time, the Freedom Party was deemed a Liberal Party — nearly kosher in other words. 

From 1999 to 2002, the People’s Party, having come third in the Federal elections, managed to find the moral flexibility to join the Freedom Party in government, to the general disgust of much of Europe’s elite, leading to diplomatic sanctions being imposed on the peaceful Alpine state by the European Union, only lifted when the “three wise men” appointed by the European Court of Human Rights recommended their termination to the President of the European Council in September 2000. 

Between 2017 and 2019, both parties, the acceptable People’s Party and the deplorable Freedom Party, formed a coalition once more — no wise men this time round. 

In 2019, the Freedom Party underperformed. 

However, their poor showing that year was due more to a loss of trust in Heinz Christian Strache, the leader of the party at the time, due to a corruption story known as the Ibiza Affair, which engulfed them than a loss of support for their policies or principles. 

Nonetheless, the Freedom Party polled 26 per cent in 1999; 26 per cent in 2017 and 29 per cent in 2024, an incremental gain of 3 per cent over 35 years — slow and steady progress in other words. 

Thus, a coalition between the People’s Party and the Freedom Party, representing such a large segment of the Austrian population, is not a foreign concept and should be, logically, the only thing on the cards. 

However, while that would be the correct thing to do politically, it wouldn’t be politically correct. 

Currently, the People’s Party, having come second and hurled their junior green coalition partners under the bus, are looking to tie the knot with the socialists, their theoretical ideological foes, for two main reasons. 

Will the politically incorrect seem politically correct after all?

Firstly, Karl Nehammer, the outgoing chancellor and current leader of the People’s Party, pledged, mainly to burnish his progressive credential, that he would never work in a coalition with Herbert Kickl because it is “impossible to form a government with someone who adores conspiracy theories” — such as vaccines having deadly side effects, mask mandates being useless and lockdowns being unnecessary as well as costly. 

Secondly, the Freedom Party has been successfully tarnished with the far right tag by the great and the good, regardless of its actual policies. The professional political class is therefore more interested in aligning with other polities across Europe in creating a firewall against what they loosely term populist parties, as happened in France earlier this year.

Oddly, a desire to control immigration, in order to uphold one’s culture, might be one of very few internal policies that all so-called populist parties across Europe have in common. 

Regardless, a coalition of professionally accepted parties would be cheered on by distant but influential types such as Mario Draghi, Ursula von der Leyen, and Ed Milliband. 

However, such a coalition would imply a majority of one in an assembly of 183 members. Uneasy lies the head that wears that crown.

It would be a government destined for immediate unpopularity, wielding a tenuous political legitimacy and another example of a tin-eared establishment unable to understand the simple, but hard to implement, desires of their compatriots. 

In preparing the intellectual landscape to push aside the clear winner of Austria’s latest parliamentary election, the People’s Party and the Socialist Party will make a much greater defeat for both down the line much more probable. 

When that comes to pass in the next few years, it will be the people again who will be put under scrutiny for having unfashionable views. 

Unfashionable perhaps but, evidently, multiplying, which is why cracks on the anti-Freedom Party front are starting to be heard within the People’s Party. 

Indeed, while Nehammer swore never to work with Kickl recently, Austrians remember that he once released a signed pledge to leave office if his friend Sebastian Kurz, the former chancellor, were forced to resign in October 2021. Kurz resigned then; Nehammer is still around now. 

Thus, much of Austria’s next political history chapter will depend on Karl Nehammer’s morals — which, some suspect, are very supple. 

Will the politically incorrect seem politically correct after all?