In 2015 Sebastian Kurz came in for heavy criticism for his hardline stance on illegal immigration. Across the border, German chancellor Angela Merkel was welcoming refugees from Syria and elsewhere who were pouring into Europe. “I said that this is a big mistake,” recalls Mr Kurz, who was Austria’s foreign minister at the time. He was accused of undermining European solidarity and values.
Three years later, Mr Kurz feels vindicated. “If I look back to 2015 and the position of the European Union in those days, I would say there has been a dramatic change of position,” the Austrian chancellor tells the Financial Times.
Thanks to his stand against Ms Merkel, Mr Kurz, just 32, has become a rare success story in a European political landscape where upheaval and failure have become commonplace. Mr Kurz’s support for tougher border controls and a clampdown on illegal immigration helped propel him to power.
That has also made him one of the most controversial figures in European politics at a time when mainstream parties are often struggling to come to terms with upstart, populist rivals.
To his critics, Mr Kurz is legitimising Austria’s far-right by advancing a xenophobic agenda, albeit couched in the innocuous terms of a metropolitan liberal. But to broadly pro-European conservatives elsewhere in the EU searching for electoral gold in an era of anti-establishment anger and identity politics, Mr Kurz looks like a role model.
“If mainstream politics wants to survive, you have to do a Kurz,” says Alexander Stubb, a former centre-right prime minister of Finland who stood to be lead candidate for the European People’s party in European Parliament elections to be held in May. A new generation of young conservative leaders, such as Spain’s Pablo Casado, Laurent Wauquiez in France and German Christian Democrats seeking a break with Ms Merkel’s centrist politics are looking to Vienna for ideas.
In their eyes, Mr Kurz’s achievement was not just to win power but to contain the rise of the Freedom party (FPÖ), the far-right movement entrenched across the country and linked historically with pan-German nationalism. Before Mr Kurz seized the leadership of his People’s party (ÖVP) in May 2017, Freedom was leading in opinion polls — and within reach of securing the chancellorship. But after a slick campaign that included the adoption of far-right positions on immigration, his party won elections in October last year, pushing Freedom back into third just behind the centre-left Social Democrats.
Nevertheless, short of an absolute majority, and with Austrian voters tired of grand coalitions between centre-left and centre-right, Mr Kurz joined forces with the Freedom party, 18 years after Austria first became a near pariah state in the EU when the centre-right formed a coalition with the far-right party set up by former Nazis.
After a year in office — half of it as holder of the EU’s rotating presidency— Mr Kurz is riding high in the polls while the Freedom party has dipped. Unemployment is expected to have fallen to 4.8 per cent in 2018 with the economy expanding at a risk of 2.7 per cent, according to estimates. Austria is once again an influential voice in Europe.
Some admirers congratulate Mr Kurz for addressing public concern about immigration, while respecting the rule of law and remaining broadly pro-European and socially liberal, an antidote to the “illiberal democracy” espoused by Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister.
“What Kurz embodies is useful conservatism,” says Mr Stubb. “He talks about an open world, internationalism and is pro-European. But he is pragmatic about solving issues. And one of the big issues is immigration. Kurz is exactly the kind of guy capable of killing Orbanism in the [centre-right] party.”
Austria’s young leader has a chance to “kiss the populists to death”, he adds.
But critics say Mr Kurz is not smothering the far-right, but enabling it, legitimising it and even fanning public concern about immigration.
“You don’t fight fire with kerosene,” says Christian Kern, a former centre-left chancellor and coalition partner of Mr Kurz who is now chairman of energy technology group FSight. “They are shifting the red lines of what is morally and politically acceptable permanently to the right.”
Straddling eastern and western Europe and a neutral buffer state after the second world war, Austria has been fertile ground for the far-right. Designated as the “first victim” of the Nazis by allies who wanted to foment resistance to Hitler during the war, Austria did not go through the same process of denazification as Germany and its collective admission of responsibility for Nazi crimes came much later.
“Austria is a wealthy, but deeply authoritarian society where there was little re-education [over] its Nazi past after the second world war,” says Barbara Toth, a journalist and Mr Kurz’s biographer, who sees more similarities with post-communist countries than with the west.
The Freedom party was established in the 1950s but rose to prominence in the late 1990s under the charismatic leadership of Jörg Haider, who earned international notoriety for his party’s xenophobia and whitewashing the country’s Nazi past. Its first stint in coalition government ran into trouble after only two years when the party split between pragmatists and radicals and was crushed in elections. Mr Haider died in a high-speed car accident in 2008.
It was the 2015-16 migrant crisis that gave the party new life. Hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants streamed through the Alps, mostly en route to Germany. But around 130,000 stayed in Austria, one of the highest per capita rates in the EU. In a country where about one-fifth of the population of under 9m is foreign born, alarm about uncontrolled immigration soared.
Mr Kurz spotted his chance. He had begun his political career as integration minister in 2011, when he was picked for the job while still a law student. He understood the potency of public concern over immigration.
“Kurz has a political nose. He smelt that it was different this time,” says Robert Menasse, an Austrian writer.
As foreign minister he opposed Ms Merkel’s welcoming approach during the migrant crisis, becoming the darling of German television talk shows and the German chancellor’s conservative critics. Without Berlin’s involvement, he secured a deal with Austria’s neighbours to close the “western Balkans route” used by refugees fleeing wars in countries such as Syria. The move was a masterstroke — it had been a key Freedom party demand — but it was ultimately a German-engineered deal between the EU and Turkey and not his diplomatic démarche that stopped the flow of migrants into Europe.
Dressed in his trademark dark suit and white shirt, Mr Kurz is a model of what Mr Menasse calls “slim fit modernity”. Speaking in his spacious wood-panelled office in Vienna, Mr Kurz is sensitive to any characterisation of him as some kind of proto-fascist. Asked about a European political tie-up with Matteo Salvini, leader of Italy’s anti-immigration League party, he says: “That’s impossible.” If he had the choice, allies say, Mr Kurz would have formed a coalition with Austria’s Neos, a new liberal party which attracts support from younger voters, especially in Vienna.
“From time to time, the People’s party produces a leader who believes in being progressive and modern, a breath of fresh air in a stale room,” says Mr Menasse. “It is an aesthetic pose. Sebastian Kurz creates this same feeling. He can’t be a rightwing radical. He’s much too modern, much too progressive. But his Weltanschauung [worldview] is very conservative.”
Mr Kurz certainly ran a modern, highly personalised election campaign, making heavy use of social media and even borrowing from Emmanuel Macron’s mould-breaking run to the French presidency. The ÖVP ran under the banner of “Sebastian Kurz List — The new People’s Party”. Its traditional black colour was ditched for turquoise.
“He was very clever in telling his story,” concedes Mr Kern about his opponent. “It was the best marketing campaign I have ever seen.”
Mr Kurz also helped himself to far-right policies and slogans.
“Kurz took many core themes of the FPÖ — on integration, immigration and security issues — and merged them into his movement,” says Ms Toth. “ Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ leader, even accused him during the 2017 campaign of being a copycat.”
In the first year of the coalition government, Mr Kurz has allowed his Freedom party allies to set a harsh tone. With his acquiescence, it has pushed tougher controls on immigration, a crackdown on benefits for foreigners, action against “parallel societies”, including a ban on girls wearing headscarves in kindergarten, and the closure of mosques accused of abusing laws prohibiting the foreign financing of religious communities. Mr Strache ordered an investigation into tens of thousands of Austrian citizens of Turkish origin suspected of illegally retaining their Turkish citizenship.
The Freedom party-controlled interior ministry has encouraged police to identify the nationality and asylum status of suspects, and to “proactively” publicise some sex attacks. It has also overseen raids on the offices and homes of senior domestic security officials.
More recently, Austria irritated its EU partners when it joined Hungary in rejecting the UN “compact” on migration, despite its supposed EU presidency role as neutral arbiter, giving the green light to other sceptical member states to follow suit. The Belgium government collapsed over the issue.
Mr Kurz rejects the suggestion that he was bowing to Freedom party pressure, arguing the UN pact failed to distinguish sufficiently between economic migrants looking for a better life and refugees applying for asylum.
“It has cost him political capital internationally — although you can’t see it domestically,” says Thomas Hofer, a Vienna-based political analyst.
Mr Kurz is keen to stress that while he wants tight curbs on illegal flows he is not opposed to migration per se. The coalition has reformed Austria’s “red-white-red card” — a residency permit reflecting the colours of the national flag — for skilled migrant workers, reducing minimum wage and other requirements to address labour shortages in some economic sectors and regions.
The coalition’s immigration clampdown remains popular among Austrians. Freedom party ministers have also championed domestic initiatives popular with its supporters, such as higher speed limits on motorways and allowing smoking in restaurants. Lothar Höbelt, history professor at Vienna university who is sympathetic to the far-right, says he does not see the Freedom party “as in any way revolutionary. They are much milder than they used to be”.
As for Mr Kurz, even his political rivals are unsure if he has far-right sympathies. “I can’t tell you,” says Mr Kern. Close observers of Austrian politics struggle to work out what he really thinks. “It’s a complete mystery to me,” says one senior EU diplomat.
One reason the centre-right/far-right alliance is deemed a success is that it marries Austrians’ hostility to illegal immigration with a broadly positive view of Europe. Unlike Mr Orban, Mr Kurz has not used the migration issue to turn Austrians against the EU.
From the outset, Mr Kurz insisted his government had to be pro-European. “It was a condition and there has never been a debate about that,” he explains. In effect, that meant the Freedom party had to drop any suggestion it might call into question Austria’s commitment to eurozone or EU membership — policies it had realised would cost it support.
But the Freedom party’s politics have jarred with Mr Kurz’s professed Europeanism. It has a formal alliance, for example, with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Western allies’ fears were heightened in August when Karin Kneissl, the Freedom party’s choice for foreign minister, danced with Mr Putin at her wedding.
Its control of the defence and interior ministries gives it oversight of Austria’s intelligence services — to the alarm of western agencies who have reportedly scaled back sharing of information with Vienna. While Austria has stronger institutions than Hungary to keep the executive in check, a police raid in March 2018 on the BVT intelligence agency on the orders of Herbert Kickl, the far-right interior minister, triggered alarm about potential abuse of power. The BVT’s job is to investigate among other things violent far-right groups, racist hate crimes and Russian meddling.
The raid was seen by some as a sign that Mr Kurz has given the Freedom party too much leeway in the coalition. The alternative view is that the young chancellor is playing a long game, giving his government partners room to make their mistakes, while he keeps his hands firmly on the levers of power. In the meantime, his critics say he has pandered to Austrians’ worst instincts.
“People wanted to have scapegoats,” says Mr Kern. “And he delivered them.”
