Austrian election yesterday, and the 2019 political crisis enters a new stage

Austria held a national election Sunday to elect a new Nationalrat (Parliament).

2019 was an unusual year in the history of Austria's Second Republic (1945-today). The government of Chancellor Sebastian "Basti" Kurz was removed by a no-confidence vote for the first time in the Second Republic. Basti became Chancellor in December 2017 at the head of a coalition of his middle-right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) and the far-right FPÖ, founded in 1955 by unrepentant ex-Nazis for unrepentant ex-Nazis, and which has never managed to get beyond its ideological roots.

Here are the results (NR-Wahl 2019) compared with the two previous Nationalrat elections and this year's EU parliamentary elections.

Basti during the campaign clearly preferred to form a new coalition with the FPÖ to continue their pro-oligarch, anti-immigrant policies of 2017-19. The FPÖ's performance Sunday has made this look considerably less likely. With their current troubles, the FPÖ will be strongly tempted to build their support by staying in the opposition and pursuing their only real issue at this point, fear and hatred of immigrants, with populist posturing belied by the economic and social policies they actually support.

The Green Party staged a dramatic comeback after failing to win parliamentary representation in 2017, because their vote fell under 4%. That was partly because there was a split-off party called Jetzt that did get parliamentary seats. But the combined Green-Jetzt vote increased from 8.2% in 2017 to 16.2% in 2019.

Numerically, there are three possible coalition options: a new edition of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition ("turquoise-blue" from the party colors); ÖVP-SPÖ ("turquoise-red"); ÖVP-Greens ("turquoise-red green"). But the actual formation of a new government will be particularly difficult. The current government is an "expert government" headed by Austria's first female Chancellor, Birgit Bierlein, appointed by Austrian President Alexander Van Der Bellen acting as head of state. It's probably too soon to speculate whether Bierlein's interim government will serve in office longer than Basti's Ibiza government. It's certainly a possible outcome.

Basti's ÖVP/FPÖ coalition government of 2017-19 was also a historic government in being one of the shortest in decades. It was plagued by a stream of scandals, many of them having to do with what became ironically known as "isolated incidents" involving members of the FPÖ being discovered or outing themselves as adherents of a radical ideology not compatible with democratic government and politics. As just one example, Upper Austrian state senator Elmar Podgorschek (FPÖ):

The Upper Austrian FPÖ state senator Elmar Podgorschek ... gives a speech [June 2018] to the [German] far-right AfD Thuringia in which he gives advice on how to take power and massively attacks the institutions of democracy. When this becomes public, Podgorschek faces fierce criticism and calls for his resignation. (Mauthausen Komitee Österreich, Viele Einzelfälle = Ein Muster 02.08.2019; my translation)

In that speech, Podgorschek endorsed the "Orbanization" of the press, a reference to the current authoritarian government of Hungary and its practice of bringing a much of the Hungarian media under the control of pro-government oligarchs. Podgorschek in 2019 was publicly pressured to step down from his state senate (Landesrat) position, in no small part because of this incident.

I was surprised this year that one scandal that I considered actually the most serious actually did not play a prominent role in this year's Nationalrat election. That was an action by the FPÖ Interior Minister Herbert Kickl in 2018 known as the "BVT affair," in which he organized an unusual police raid on the security bureau in his own ministry, an action which led to some European nations to cut back their cooperation with Austrian intelligence because of fears that Austria couldn't adequately protect sources and methods.

The trigger that set in rapid motion the ousting of Basti's right/far-right government was what quickly became known as the Ibiza Scandal that broke in May. German and Austrian investigative reporters revealed a video which showed two senior figures in the FPÖ, including Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, proposing corrupt deals and illegal schemes to a woman they thought was the niece of a Russian oligarch in a villa on the popular vacation island of Ibiza. The video was shot in 2017 before that year's election, when Strache was still an opposition leader. (Neither has been convicted of any violations of law in connection with the video as of this writing.) Frederick Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer's book Die Ibiza-Affäre (2019) describes the Ibiza meeting and the unfolding of the scandal.

This led critics of Basti's 2017-19 government to refer to it as the "Ibiza government" and the FPÖ as the "Ibiza party."

The falling apart of Basti's turquoise-blue government was followed by some bitter polemics between the ÖVP and the FPÖ. Even if the FPÖ hadn't had such a low vote in this election, it would have been a real challenge to put together a new Ibiza coalition.

The election-night conventional wisdom among Austrian commentators was that an ÖVP-Green coalition is the most plausible. But that is by no means an easy negotiation either. Basti has made it clear he wants to continue with the basically hard right and anti-immigrant policies of his Ibiza government. In his first post-election comments to the ORF national news service, Green Party leader Werner Kogler was cautious about a coalition, emphasizing that the Greens wanted to "change radically" (radical ändern) from the Ibiza government's policies. Basti's climate policies are a bad joke. And he has been distinctly, demagogically anti-immigrant, including in the 2019 election campaign. The Greens have been the easily the most pro-immigrant of the five parties of the new Nationalrat. The Greens have just staged a big comeback. And in the EU election this year, the Greens were the most popular party among Austrian voters under 30. Basti will have to offer them a very good deal to make the advantages of being in government outweigh the risks of being in a conservative-leaning government headed by him

A government coalition of the ÖVP and SPÖ has governed Austria for a large part of the Second Republic's existence. But that was in a party formation that essentially consisted of those two parties and the FPÖ. Now the Greens and NEOS complicate that picture. Like the Greens, the SPÖ will have to calculate whether the possible benefits of being a junior partner to Basti's ÖVP in the government would outweigh the highly likely political losses it would entail. The example of Germany, where their sister party, the SPD, is falling behind the Greens, will (and should!) loom large in their consideration.

Basti brought down a coalition government with the Social Democrats in 2017 and one with the far-right party this year. So he doesn't exactly look like the ideal coalition partner for anybody.

Another important result of the election. The "Wunderwuzzi" (whiz-kid) aura that Basti had with a lot of journalists who should have known better was severely tarnished by this campaign. And the new SPÖ leader Pamela Rendi-Wagner not only shocked the press with how well she campaigned but managed to make her acknowledgement of the SPÖ's disappointing result sound like a rousing call for intensifying the fight. The strong Green vote compared to 2017 was due in large part to voters switching from the SPÖ to the Greens.