Pro-Israel and 'antisemitic': Freedom Party of Austria tasked with forming government

The far-right, pro-Israel Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) has been tasked with forming a government for the first time, alarming many in a country which has often struggled to shake its Nazi past.
President Alexander Van der Bellen on Monday asked FPO leader Herbert Kickl, whose party came first in the legislative elections at the end of September with nearly 29 percent of the vote, "to lead discussions with the conservatives" to form a coalition, referring to the centre-right Austrian People's Party (OVP).
He added that it had "not been easy to take" such a decision and promised to "ensure respect for the principles and rules of the Republic".
The OVP has announced its openness to working with the FPO, ending the previous cordon sanitaire around the party which has been described as ethnonationalist and Islamophobic.
The opposition Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) has warned that Austria is facing "a new coalition of horror" with a government that would be ready to "destroy the welfare state, dismantle democracy and divide our society".
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
The FPO has promised a programme of mass deportation and a halt to the "Islamisation" of Europe.
Kickl has promoted slogans such as "Fortress Austria" and "Austria First" and called for the expulsion of people with migrant heritage who "refuse to integrate" into Austria.
Pro-Israel, antisemitic?
As talks continued between Van der Bellen and Kickl on Monday, hundreds gathered outside the Hofburg palace in Vienna, calling on the president to "throw him out".
Among them were Jewish leaders and activists who have expressed concern about the FPO's historic antisemitism - the party was founded in 1956 by a former Nazi minister of agriculture and SS officer - and numerous incidents of Kickl and other officials flirting with Nazi-era imagery and language.
Kickl had sparked controversy by campaigning on a slogan to become a “Volkskanzler” (people’s chancellor), a term used by Adolf Hitler.

Others have been criticised for using Nazi-era imagery on social media, while a video by the FPO youth wing in 2023, which featured the balcony where Hitler declared the union with Germany in 1938, was referred to Austria's domestic intelligence agency.
The video, which Kickl called "great" in spite of the controversy, also featured images of the French Nazi collaborator Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Japanese ultra-nationalist militant Yukio Mishima and Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.
The 10,000-strong Viennese Jewish community maintains a no-cooperation policy with the Freedom Party, as does Israel's foreign ministry - despite, however, the FPO's increasingly vocal support for the country.
In 2010, the FPO signed alongside other far-right parties what they called the Jerusalem Declaration, in which they affirmed Israel's "right to exist" and right to self-defence, particularly against "Islamic terror".
The party has recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and has opposed resolutions in the EU criticising Israel.
Andreas Peham, a researcher at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, told Haaretz that the FPO remained 'at its programmatic-historical core, an antisemitic party'
Since the beginning of the war in Gaza in October 2023, the FPO has thrown its full weight behind Israel's assault, which has so far killed more than 45,000 Palestinians.
Kickl has opposed a ceasefire in Gaza, saying that "as long as the terrorists of Hamas hold Israeli hostages captive, a ceasefire is unlikely."
Analysts of the far right have characterised the party's pro-Israel shift as strategic and based on a perceived mutual Muslim enemy rather than a result of any sincere attempt to shed its Nazi past.
Andreas Peham, a researcher at the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance in Vienna, told Haaretz last year that the FPO remained "at its programmatic-historical core, an antisemitic party."
"Israel represents for the far right the image of the 'good Jew,' the muscular Jew, while the 'globalists,' the 'multiculturalists' and George Soros remain part of the antisemitic discourse," he explained, referring to the Hungarian Jewish philanthropist who has been at the centre of many far-right conspiracy theories.
"It was purely strategic, and wasn't actually related to any kind of real change within the party regarding antisemitism."
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.