On Monday afternoon, Austrian officials announced that voters had chosen Alexander Van der Bellen, a former leader of the Green Party, as president, narrowly defeating Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party in one of Europe’s most closely watched elections in years.
It was a close call for Austria; Mr. Hofer would have been Europe’s first far-right head of state since World War II. But for the Freedom Party, there is victory in defeat: Not only did Mr. Hofer make it to the second round of voting, easily outpolling candidates from the center right and center left, but the result was down to the wire — he was ahead on Sunday night, before absentee votes were counted. Just under half the country voted for the far right. As Mr. Hofer said in his concession statement on Facebook, posted Monday afternoon, “The effort for this campaign is not lost, but an investment in the future.”
In one sense, Mr. Hofer’s near success is just the latest episode in the rise of the xenophobic right across Europe. But it’s also no surprise that it should happen in Austria. After World War II, the country declared itself Hitler’s first victim, a handy myth that allowed it to avoid grappling with its own, central role in the Nazi era. It muffled debate within a stifling “grand coalition” centrism, with the left and right ruling more or less in concert. The country did not begin to confront its Nazi past until the 1980s, when Kurt Waldheim was running for president. Despite reports that he had been a Nazi intelligence officer in Greece, he easily won, an event that set off a decade of soul-searching by the Austrian establishment.
The far right has long had an institutional home in Austrian politics. Mr. Hofer’s Freedom Party was founded in the 1950s in part as a home for former Nazis. The party appealed to a long-running, old-fashioned nationalist streak in Austrian culture: The nationalist Burschenschaften, or fraternities, promote an idealized memory of a purified Teutonic past, heavy with anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sentiment. Mr. Hofer has courted them assiduously, arguing, for instance, that the German-speaking Italian region of South Tyrol should be allowed to join Austria (a key nationalist goal). At his inauguration as deputy speaker of the national Parliament he wore a cornflower, a Nazi symbol from the 1930s.
Still, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the Freedom Party became a national force, when Jörg Haider modernized the party around a populist, anti-immigrant message that also appealed to Austrians who were tired of the stultifying centrism of coalition politics. In 1999 Mr. Haider rode the party into a coalition government with the center right — but once in power, the party showed that it couldn’t live up to its bombastic promises. Mr. Haider died in a car accident in 2008, leaving the far right rudderless.
Perhaps it was only a matter of time before a new, savvier generation of party leaders, combined with a weakened political establishment and rising xenophobia, returned to the center of Austrian politics. But Mr. Hofer’s success is not just about who runs Vienna; it is also a case for other European far-right parties. That’s because, if Austria is in some ways uniquely vulnerable to the far right, in other ways it’s an odd fit: Unemployment there is at the European Union average, while politics are consensus-oriented, risk-averse and fundamentally conservative. If the Freedom Party’s anti-establishment, anti-immigrant message can work in Austria, it can work anywhere.
Even if Mr. Hofer and the far right lost this time, their strong showing will tempt the mainstream parties to copy their message. Austrian and European politics are poised to make a worrying shift to the right, regardless of who wins what election.
And the Freedom Party will be back. Elections to the Austrian Parliament are scheduled for 2018, when Heinz-Christian Strache, the party’s leader, will make a bid for chancellor (a position that has much more power than the president). Between now and then, Mr. Hofer’s narrow defeat allows the Freedom Party to portray itself as a victim, excluded from power despite large-scale popular support, and to claim that the system is stacked against it. As Mr. Hofer himself said on Sunday night, “Either I will become president tomorrow, or in two years Heinz-Christian Strache is chancellor of Austria.”
Florian Bieber, a professor of Southeast European history and politics at the University of Graz, Austria, is a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University.