Soon after the newly elected Austrian government was formed as a coalition of the conservatives and the far right in December 2017, an appeal to boycott the far right Austrian ministers was published in Le Monde in France, while the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, received the new Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz most warmly. This was very different from the unfriendly reaction of the EU to the first conservative-far right Austrian government in 2000. It is too simplistic to say that Europe has meanwhile moved much more to the right. Rather, the omnipresent neoliberal – more accurately, market-fundamentalist – ideology has swallowed up all political parties, from the social democratic left to the Christian democratic right, and has now found its true political destination.
The programme of the new Austrian government illustrates well this political evolution, and the current Austrian social democrats in opposition could have subscribed to three quarters of this programme – indeed, some of them even discussed the possibility of a left/far-right coalition. Market-fundamentalist doctrine rejects any intervention of politics in the market forces which apparently operate independently from human interference according to supposed natural laws that economists seek to describe mathematically. So, the core duty of any government – implementing economic policy along the lines of its ideological convictions – is taken away. Governments now see themselves as managers who administer and protect a free and unrestrained development of markets and analyse their changes and moves, like zoo-keepers commenting on their growing animals. Governments are expected to facilitate, not to govern, and so it increasingly matters little whether the ruling political party is named socialist, liberal, conservative or far right.
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