In rejecting a far-right candidate for president on Sunday, voters in Austria showed the limitations of President-elect Donald Trump’s tailwinds on a continent where extremist politics have traditionally brought cataclysm.
Call it the other Trump effect, one that may sow caution among some European voters suspicious of the advances of populist politicians.
Populist forces have unsettled politics in Europe and the United States, frequently by using fake news and fanning fears of globalisation and migration. The British vote to leave the European Union this year was complicated by such anxieties.
But the choice before Austrians was perhaps the starkest. The bitter yearlong campaign for the presidency pitted Norbert Hofer, a leader of the far-right Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, against a mild-mannered 72-year-old former Green Party leader, Alexander Van der Bellen.
This was a zero-sum political choice, and Van der Bellen’s decisive victory — by 6.6 percentage points with 99 per cent of votes counted — left his supporters predictably jubilant, if surprised.
In recent days, they had seemed resigned to fearing that Trump’s victory, in particular, was tilting the outcome here against them.
“It is unbelievable,” said Wolfgang Petritsch, a veteran diplomat, a biographer of former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and chairman of Austria’s Marshall Plan foundation. “Austria saves the world!” he said with a twist of irony.
Austria is too small a sample to know whether the populist tide is abating. Europe still faces pivotal elections next year in France and Germany. Those races will help define politics in the European Union for the remainder of the decade.
Broader acceptance
But Austria does seem to disprove the idea that Trump’s victory accelerated a broader public acceptance of populist, anti-establishment forces.
In recent days, many in Austria had seemed resigned to the likelihood of a Trump bounce for the far right. Hofer himself said in an interview last month that the US election had bolstered support for his Freedom Party. Yet it was not the case. “People followed Trump with curiosity, shock, fear, jubilation, but I don’t think they drew any conclusions,” Johannes Hubner, a Freedom Party parliamentary deputy, said on Sunday night. “It’s like a Hollywood movie.”
Perhaps the message Austrians received, he said, was “beware of another Trump — don’t vote for Hofer.”
— New York Times News Service
