One year later, that assessment still looks valid: Kurz remains popular among the Austrian electorate and, were another election to be held today, polls indicate that his ÖVP may even fare better than it did last October. What’s more, the coalition Kurz built with the far-right FPÖ last December is remarkably stable despite a string of scandals implicating top FPÖ ministers and politicians. Somewhat paradoxically, Kurz seems to have figured out how to simultaneously keep the peace with his far-right partners and make it clear that he and his party are completely separate from the more unsavory elements of their rhetoric. [...]
It helps that, on what is perhaps the dominant political issue in Austria these days—migration—the ÖVP and FPÖ are essentially in lockstep. Over the course of the year, they’ve proposed initiatives and discussed the issue on the European level in a way that makes it clear they are in agreement, far more than the ÖVP was with the SPÖ in the last government. In fact, apart from a debate over a proposed ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, which did briefly cause some tensions between the two earlier this year, there aren’t many issues that divide the coalition partners, policy-wise. “There should be, but there aren’t any,” said Christian Rainer, the editor in chief of the Austrian news magazine Profil. “We don’t really get the feeling that there are any fights between those two parties, not even behind the scenes.”
The idea that the government speaks with a single voice, however, only goes so far. When a new scandal involving an FPÖ minister or politician has come up—and there have been several this year—Kurz and his ÖVP have made it clear that this was the FPÖ’s problem alone. In January, when the FPÖ’s top candidate in Lower Austria was found to have ties to a Nazi-era songbook that featured lyrics about murdering Jews, Kurz said on Twitter that the government would have “zero tolerance” for anti-Semitism and racism, but otherwise didn’t comment much. This summer, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl accepted a gift of two police horses from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a controversial move given criticism of Orbán’s illiberal reforms back home. Then, in August, Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl (also nominated by the FPÖ) caused controversy when she gave a warm welcome to Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding, hitting the dance floor with the Russian leader. (Kurz, too, attended the wedding; he even caught a ride back to the airport with Putin.) [...]
The Kickl situation highlighted the inherent contradictions in Kurz’s strategy: For the first time, it seemed like he had no choice but to speak out against an FPÖ minister within his own government. At the same time, though, political observers I spoke with in Vienna seemed to believe this was hardly a sign of the government’s imminent demise. In large part that’s because there’s arguably no truly viable alternative for voters who want to oppose Kurz’s government. The center-left SPÖ has spent the past year more involved in an internal identity crisis than focused on mounting a real opposition to Kurz; the Peter Pilz List, headed in the elections by the ex-Greens MP Peter Pilz, was rocked with sexual-harassment scandals that forced Pilz himself to resign; the Greens fell out of parliament last fall, giving them little platform nationally to oppose the government. “There is no opposition within the parliament,” Rainer said. “There’s no one anyone could turn to, so people are still very much in favor of both [the ÖVP and FPÖ].”
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