Marc Champion: When the far right wins in Hitler's birthplace

Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, looks set to welcome its first far-right Chancellor since World War II, in the form of Freedom Party head Herbert Kickl. This looks less like an anomaly than part of a trend that’s sweeping the developed West, so for those of us who believe in the value of liberal democracy and its institutions, how worried should we be?

A lot is being written about the accelerators of Austria’s nationalist phenomenon. These include Russian troll farms and alt-right networks, as well as the Austrian center-right’s decision to “normalize” the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) by adopting some of its ideas and inviting it to share power. Kickl himself is a former interior minister, who had police raid the country’s intelligence service offices in an attempt to discredit them.

But while these are valid concerns, focusing on external political factors that helped the FPO win 29% of the vote in September risks avoiding the core issue. For whatever malign influences there may have been, it’s the fertility of the soil onto which they fell that matters. And in Austria, the ground was rich.

Austria is unusual in a number of ways, not least in that it wasn’t forced to confront its Nazi past after World War II to the degree Germany was. There was a much less thorough purge of fascist elites and, at least until the 1980s, Austrians portrayed themselves as victims of German aggression, despite having for the most part been willing collaborators.

Hence the ability of Anton Reinthaller, a senior official in Austria’s wartime government with the rank of SS Brigade Leader, to establish a postwar political party, the FPO, even after being arrested and sentenced for his wartime role. He may not have been the worst among Nazis, but he most certainly was one of them.

But however odious one may find some of the Freedom Party’s history and ideas, if the ongoing coalition talks succeed and Kickl emerges as Chancellor, there’s less cause for existential alarm than for examining where more liberal parties went wrong and how to preserve the independent institutions that separate free societies from unfree. That’s a growing challenge worldwide, because public belief in the unique value of democracy is fading.

Austria’s postwar politics always looked uncomfortably like a stitch-up between the centrist parties, designed to share the spoils of power. When the Social Democratic Party and conservative People’s Party alternated in office, each would replace the other’s appointees to head state companies and agencies. When ruling together, they shared them. It was inherently corrupt and increasingly beset by scandal. The former prime minister and one-time conservative wunderkind Sebastian Kurz resigned over bribery allegations in 2021, and was convicted of perjury earlier this year. He had lied about his influence in appointments to the country’s version of a sovereign wealth fund.

Populists thrive in the void left by such failure. So it should come as no surprise that the FPO’s messages — from the “remigration” of unwanted foreigners, to lifting sanctions on Moscow and restarting imports of cheap Russian energy — should have found an audience. But what matters is that Austria’s imperfect democracy should survive a Freedom Party government. There’s reason for hope, but also extreme vigilance.

Poland’s hard-right Law and Justice party, after all, did its best to destroy that country’s young democratic institutions while in office — starting with independent courts and media — but still lost elections in 2023. Even Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s hold on power looks increasingly shaky, despite 14 years of untrammeled constitutional gerrymandering to ensure he keeps it. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, another leader drawn from a party with fascist roots, has to date governed as a pragmatist.

At the same time, the business of repairing institutional damage in Poland has proved extremely difficult. It would also be a brave call to say Donald Trump won’t do lasting injury to America’s constitutional separation of powers during a second term in office; he tried hard enough the first time. Long on the defensive, the far right is increasingly on the march and often in lockstep with President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

As for the FPO’s fascist roots, Godwin’s Law — commonly, if inaccurately, understood to say that the first person to reference Hitler in a political debate loses the argument — still applies. Mike Godwin, the US attorney who conjured the rule in 1990, has said he did so to highlight what he saw at the time as hyperbole and a profound lack of perspective over the peculiar depths that Germany plumbed during the Jewish Holocaust. It remains a useful corrective. Yet as Godwin himself said more recently, talking about Hitler has become important again.

We are once more in a period when swathes of our populations are struggling economically and frustrated by the failure of traditional political parties to deliver solutions. As in the ‘30s, populist strongmen are offering simplistic remedies and targeting foreign scapegoats. A trade war looms that would again end a long period of globalization that created extremes of wealth and inequality.

Nothing is foretold and much is different, including the scale of the hardship (today’s weak growth rates are no Great Depression), choice of scapegoat (more Muslim immigrants than Jews), and levels of violence involved in today’s rising nationalisms. When Hitler’s Nazi party won 37% of the vote in elections to the German Reichstag in 1932, gaining a plurality of seats for the first time as the FPO has now done in Austria, it already wielded a banned “Storm Division” of street toughs. These were legalized as part of a power sharing deal, and the rest is history.

None of today’s western populists deploy an equivalent to the brown shirts (the Proud Boys and their friends notwithstanding). None has written a Mein Kampf. And many represent complex coalitions, as historian and journalist Katja Hoyer wrote here of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland.

So direct comparisons with Hitler remain hyperbolic. But we need to be much more concerned over how easily strongmen can destroy the institutions that enable their initial rise to power and protect our individual rights. On this score, the 1930s rise of fascism remains the best warning we have.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.