The predictable, but decreasing gusto of voices decrying the imminent fall of democracy has yet again risen, if with predictable parrotlike repetition, over the weekend's election in Austria. Held five years after the snap election forced by the Ibiza scandal,
The FPÖ, the "Liberty", or rather "libertarian" party of Austria, has however marked itself against the twicket of far right/populist far, populist, hard or even "new" right through existing throughout the entire post-occupation (ending in 1955, and leaving behind a constitutional scar in neutrality, requiring the permission of victory powers in belatedly entering the European Union 40 years later), posing a challenge which has often been considered, well, "queer" rather than frightening, and a different electorate. In essence, it is a party difficult to grasp in terms of ideology and tenable to do so only in terms class, posing a "third estate" or middle ground to the industrialist, upper-class, conservative ÖVP (the heir to the party which ran the Austrian dictatorship during the 1930s, and hardly ever denounced for it) and the working-class SPD, a faction of the socio-economic centre, simultaneously of liberal and the nationalist, or the Liberal Democrats and UKIP if you will.
This has changed, of course, through the inexorable and irrevocable process of breaking through, posing now - at an "old" figure of a bare 30 % - the role of the "major" party of Austria. In some regards, it is no more imposing now than in 1999, and in the likely red-cyan coalition which will emerge, perhaps less so.
