Austria Is Now The Flashpoint For Yet Another Clash of Civilizations

Norbert Hofer, the far-right presidential candidate of the Freedom Party of Austria, lost his election yesterday to Alexander Van der Bellen of the Green Party by a razor-thin margin of 0.6% after initial vote counts had him in the lead, pending counting of absentee ballots.

While the result was disappointing to Europe’s international far-right, the fact that Hofer came so close to the presidency is somewhat astonishing in itself. This is Western Europe we’re talking about here! Just over the border in Germany, anti-immigration Facebook posts get your home raided by the police, but in kindred Austria, the anti-immigration Facebook posters (and believe me, Freedom Party figures are avid posters) are coming within a few thousand votes of the presidency.

The mainstream media narrative did not have a place for Hofer before the first round of the Austrian presidential election, and he had to break into the narrative by placing first with a third of the vote, ahead of all the other mainstream, independent, and left-wing candidates. That first result was very different from polling beforehand, which showed Hofer consistently behind Van der Bellen.

Hofer is a gun enthusiast, a description you will rarely hear applied to a Western European these days. He makes a point of carrying at each of his campaign events. He has four children, even as the fertility rate in Austria is around 1.44 children per woman. He is an honorary member of one of the 160 Burschenschaften in Germany and Austria – student fencing fraternities formed as German nationalist organizations in the early 19^th century.

While very subdued compared to their original incarnations, I am told by members that, unlike American college fraternities, the Burschenschaften are still often actively politically right-wing, nationalist, and even monarchist. They are notable for requiring new members to complete several bouts of fencing without facial protection. The resulting scars have been a tell-tale sign of a Burschenschaftler for more than a century.

Hofer served on the Hungarian border during his military service from 1990 to 1991. He was a border guard on the same border through which millions of Middle Eastern and African migrants are now entering Austria. Poetic value aside, it is unsurprising that the anti-immigration candidate is a former border guard. The chain-smoking professor Alexander Van der Bellen, in contrast, is a self-described “child of refugees” from an aristocratic Dutch-Russian family that fled the Bolsheviks (the Van der Bellens espoused “liberal” politics) to Estonia, Germany and beyond.

The first round of the presidential election was a  ‘political earthquake,’ which had Austria’s ruling center-left and center-right ruling parties fall to fourth and fifth place respectively. The correct and fashionable opinion thereafter was that Hofer must be defeated by the combined votes of all right-thinking people who oppose fascism and bigotry, even if they dislike the very left-wing alternative. Van der Bellen even explicitly pitched himself as the “lesser evil.”

And yet, Norbert Hofer still reached 49.7% of the vote.

In France in 2002, a similar situation occurred, but with a very different outcome. Jean-Marie Le Pen, representing Front National (which shares a European Parliament group with the Austrian Freedom Party), inexplicably made it to the second round of the French presidential election following a chaotic first round. But Le Pen lost to incumbent Jacques Chirac with only 18% of the vote after every other party in the running, spanning the whole political spectrum, pledged to vote Chirac to defeat fascism and bigotry. Chirac won with the greatest margin of victory in a French presidential election of all time, beating out the election of 1848 which was won by Napoleon’s nephew and heir. Le Pen was facing an uphill battle to say the least.

While a lot of things have changed between 2002 and 2016, namely the recent illegal migration crisis and the relative mainstreaming of certain far-right parties in Europe, the discrepancy is too great to ignore. Front National’s recent popularity is at least partially a result of their moderation under the elder Le Pen’s daughter, who disavowed her father for his staunch views that were to the right of her own.

The Austrian Freedom Party, au contraire, has been something of a perennial force in Austrian politics, and in 1999 and 2002 – while Le Pen was being summarily shut out by a coalition of the good-thinkers – even formed a ruling coalition with the center-right party. Not quite the hostile no-platforming that branded bigots are supposed to receive in Western Europe. The Freedom Party never moderated itself, and The Telegraph even notes that Hofer was “responsible for drafting the new Freedom Party manifesto which has taken the party back to its nationalist roots, focusing on ‘identity.’”

Forget France now – compared to Germany, Austria is a veritable nationalist wonderland. Germany has no equivalent to the Freedom Party. The closest thing is the Alternative for Germany (AfD), but the AfD was only formed in 2013, and just recently split into a moderate and a hardline wing, with the AfD’s founder going the moderate route. The Austrian Freedom Party was founded way back in 1956, and traces its roots to the Revolutions of 1848. My intuition is that the AfD in its original incarnation was more similar to the Austrian BZÖ, a moderate splinter group from the Freedom Party. Even now the AfD’s hardline incarnation it is not quite the same as the Freedom Party — neither in power, popularity nor positions.

This is a bit funny if you subscribe to the theory that mass migration and the countless societal ills that follow it will cause a previously peaceful and secure nation to vote nationalist.

Austria, bearing the brunt of the illegal migrant influx after Hungary and the Balkan countries, received 90,000 asylum applications in 2015 compared to more than 1.5 million in Germany. Germany is ten times bigger than Austria, but received more than fifteen times the number of migrants. Austria has had a thriving far-right emboldened and empowered to the point of being within a percentage point of the presidency due to the migrant crisis, but Germany’s far worse crisis has barely given impetus to a moderate Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party like the AfD.

The AfD still has no seats in the national parliament, the Bundestag. It only has 2 out of 96 German seats in the European parliament. To its credit, it has about 5% of all German regional parliament seats, but that is not going to get them very far in achieving their goals. The ultranationalist German NPD was buoyed to the point of winning 1 out of 96 German European parliament seats, but still has none in the Bundestag, and less than one half of one percent of the regional parliament seats.

The Austrian Freedom Party has a little more than 20% of national, regional and European parliament seats for Austria, and it has been in that range for more than 20 years.

It all comes down to the fact that Austria is not really a Western European country per se. That may seem obvious if you glance at a map, but the standard view tends to be that Austria falls into a category of advanced, educated and socially liberal countries like Germany, France, Sweden, Belgium and Britain where the Left is right and the Right is left out of parliament.

It is actually astonishing how much ritualized 1984-style two-minutes-of-hate UKIP, Front National and the AfD receive in their respective countries for parties that literally have between zero and four representatives in their national parliaments. This is considered perfectly reasonable and normal in Britain, France and Germany, and the screaming will increase exponentially before the number rises to five. But it is absolutely not the case in Austria. There was little pressure for the Freedom Party to moderate before this election, and there will be even less now.

There is a country that borders Austria, with a similar shape and similar population, that also has a thriving far-right, and also received a comparatively small number of illegal migrants but experienced an outsized electoral response to them. Can you guess what it is?

Hungary, coincidentally, used to be the same country as Austria. They called it Austria-Hungary and it existed until 1918, when the military intervention of the United States in World War I tipped the balance of power in favor of Britain and France and against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Austria-Hungary was subsequently dismembered into a handful of ethnic-national states according to the latest and most fashionable progressive political opinions. Austria and Hungary, as the two original constituents, lost considerable amounts of territory and coethnic populations.

Hungary today is notable for being the most staunchly and uniformly nationalist, conservative, anti-EU, and anti-migration state in the European Union. Hungary’s government has been methodically centralizing leadership, expelling foreign money and influence, and shoring up Hungarian sovereignty since 2010. It shares this trajectory with nearby Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the four of which together make up the Visegrad Group, which is emitting rumblings of an incipient sovereign geopolitical bloc.

Poland in large part, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, like Hungary, all used to be subjects of the Habsburg Crown in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they were until 1918. It hasn’t even been a full century since Austria and the Visegrad Four were one country under one Emperor.

In light of Austria’s divergent political landscape, which increasingly resembles that of neighboring Hungary than neighboring Germany, it may be valuable to speculate to what extent Austria is going to be involved in a resurgent and sovereign Central European bloc. If Austria cannot effect full sovereignty, its anxious natives will at least make a useful fifth column against hegemony from the West for a Polish or Russian power to the East.

I have heard from German friends that Austrians do not share the guilty mindset of Germans over World War II since they view the NSDAP as a German, and not an Austrian, phenomenon. An Austrian accused of Nazi sympathies would point out that Austria was the first country to be occupied by Hitler’s Germany, prior even to Poland. How could Austrians support Hitler? They were his first victims!

That may sound like a self-serving narrative to a discerning progressive, but that Austrians have this narrative at all is evidence of their independent streak (electoral results are another), and is precisely the kind of self-serving narrative that a sovereign country would need to have. Lack of a self-serving narrative is evidence of lack of intellectual sovereignty, from which all other sovereignty flows.

It seems to me that Austria is not 100% like Britain, Germany or France. Instead, I would say Austria is 50% like Hungary and 50% like Germany. The Western influence will certainly keep Austria trailing Poland and Hungary in any endeavours to establish sovereignty from the DC-Brussels axis, but whatever remnants of Mitteleuropa remain in Austria are going to be expressed through right-wing politics and affinity for Eastern neighbors.

There is something else of significance here: Austria never joined NATO. It is a lone neutral country in a sea of NATO members in Europe. Austria, like Germany, was occupied by the four victorious powers of World War II (Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union), and the USSR only withdrew its troops and granted Austria independence in 1955 on the condition that it remain permanently neutral.

If the Soviet shield protected the Visegrad countries and other Eastern European countries from the worst depravities of Western-style liberal democracy, we can also see a bit of that influence in Austria’s position today. It’s an open secret that the American military-intelligence apparatus weaponized Marxist ideologies and managed German media in its quest to combat Nazis and Soviets. Austria’s relative insulation after 1945 under the shadow of the towering Eastern Bloc may have spared them the worst and allowed Austria’s indigenous political culture to flourish and develop along lines similar to its Eastern neighbors, rather than its Western ones.

East Germany, which was a Soviet client state from 1945 to 1991, is also a bastion of right-wing politics compared to West Germany. The same reasons generally apply.

Vienna is no nationalist enclave – quite the opposite – but the Austrian countryside consistently votes nationalist. Norbert Hofer is from the Austrian state of Burgenland, which, as if to perfectly confirm my theories, narrowly snakes along the Austrian-Hungarian border. Needless to say, Hofer and the Freedom Party consistently perform best in Burgenland.

The geographic space of East-Central Europe between Germany and Russia is becoming the focal point of a four-way clash of civilizations between Western and Central Europe, Russia and Islam. A rising Poland is faced with an Americanized Europe swelling with Muslim and African migrants on one side and a warring, defiant Russia to its East.

Though Poland and Hungary are first-hand witnesses to this four-way clash, Austria is the very epicenter of it. In Austria the presidential election is evenly split between the disciples of Angela “Open Borders” Merkel and of Viktor “Get ‘Em Out” Orban, while an Islamic tide flows through the country and Russian money and influence are strategically injected into the situation.

Due to the precarious balance of power in Austria I have refrained from making predictions so far, but I would not be surprised to see Polish, Hungarian or Russian attempts to put the Austrian far-right in power and thereby secure an ally. Whether that means a naked coup or just subtler methods will depend on how quickly the security situation in Austria and neighboring countries deteriorates. Between the possibility of a Trump presidency dismantling NATO and a large-scale jihadist guerilla war in Europe, there will be plenty to look out for.

Austria will be a unique flashpoint to watch in the coming years.

Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.

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