The far right Austrian Freedom Party’s leader Herbert Kickl has met the country’s President as expectations mount that he will be tasked with trying to form a new government.
Mr Kickl’s party won Austria’s parliamentary election in September, taking 28.8% of the vote and beating outgoing Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party into second place.
But in October, President Alexander Van der Bellen tasked Mr Nehammer with trying to form a new government after his party said it would not go into government with the Freedom Party under Mr Kickl, while others refused to work with the Freedom Party at all.
Those efforts to form a governing alliance without the far right collapsed in the first few days of the new year and Mr Nehammer said on Saturday that he would resign.
The People’s Party then signalled that it might be open to working under Mr Kickl.
Negotiations between the two are not guaranteed to succeed, but there are no longer any other realistic coalition options in the current parliament and polls suggest that a new election soon could strengthen the Freedom Party further.
The far right and the conservatives have governed together before, but on previous occasions with the Freedom Party as the junior partner.
Most recently, they ran Austria from 2017 to 2019 in a government in which Mr Kickl – a 56-year-old with a taste for provocation – served as interior minister. It collapsed over a scandal surrounding the Freedom Party’s leader at the time.
In its election manifesto titled “Fortress Austria”, the Freedom Party has called for the “remigration of uninvited foreigners”, for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.
The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.
Mr Kickl has criticised “elites” in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.
