Opinion | You Can’t Trust the Far Right

With just a few days to go before the European parliamentary elections, Austria’s government is in a tailspin. The implications for the rest of the Continent are profound.

On Sunday, Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor and leader of the center-right Austrian People’s Party, called for snap elections following the resignation of Heinz-Christian Strache, Mr. Kurz’s vice chancellor and the head of the far-right Freedom Party. Days before, a two-year-old video surfaced in German media showing Mr. Strache offering government contracts and a stake in one of Austria’s largest newspapers in exchange for Russian support for his party. It turned out that the footage, whose source remains unknown, was a sting operation. But if its goal was to expose Mr. Strache’s cynical willingness to sell out his country to a foreign power with a well-known record of undermining elections, it worked.

When Mr. Kurz brought the Freedom Party into government in 2017 as the junior coalition partner, he claimed — and many believed — that doing so would “civilize” the party, which was founded by ex-Nazis and which regularly trafficked in racist and anti-Semitic tropes. (In 2012, Mr. Strache posted a cartoon on Facebook depicting a hooked-nose banker wearing Star of David cuff links, which he claimed was a critique of “greedy bankers” rather than anti-Semitic.) The argument was that by bringing the far right into mainstream politics, its leaders would have to tone down their radicalism and learn to appeal to a broader section of voters. With parties similar to — and allied with — the Freedom Party on the rise across Europe, this seemed to some like a sensible strategy.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did the Freedom Party fail to move away from its hard-right positions, it pulled the center right closer to its own extreme ideas on immigration and Islam. But the latest revelations demonstrate even more why Mr. Kurz should never have trusted the Freedom Party in the first place.

Other mainstream European politicians facing threats from a growing far right should take heed: pandering to them doesn’t work. For all the rhetoric of national sovereignty routinely espoused by Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and other populist leaders, Mr. Strache’s fall shows how these supposedly lofty ideas are a cover for opportunism and hypocrisy.

In the leaked video, Mr. Strache is seen drinking champagne and eating sushi at a villa in Ibiza, Spain, where he was meeting with a woman claiming to be the niece of a Russian oligarch with 250 million euros to burn. Among other ideas, he suggests that the woman open a construction company, which he would then ensure received government contracts. As the evening goes on, Mr. Strache comes up with a scheme in which the niece would quietly buy a controlling stake in one of Austria’s most influential newspapers and in return the paper would help “push” the Freedom Party before the 2017 elections.

Mr. Strache’s open desire to seek Russian help in influencing his country’s election, while shocking, should not come as a surprise. The Freedom Party entered into a formal coalition agreement with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in 2016 and some of its members participated as “election observers” in Russia’s fraudulent referendum during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

And the Freedom Party isn’t unique here. The right-wing League party of Italy signed a similar cooperation agreement with United Russia, and has loudly argued against the sanctions on Moscow which the European Union and the United States imposed in response to Russian aggression against Ukraine. Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, now rebranded as Rassemblement National, received a loan of 9 million euros from a Russian bank in 2014. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has positioned himself as a leading figure of the European far right, also has strong ties to Russia. Mr. Orban openly admires Vladimir Putin’s “strongman” style of politics; following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he broke with the rest of the European Union and hosted Mr. Putin in Budapest in 2015.

In short, Mr. Kurz should have known that he was striking a deal with the devil when he formed the coalition with the Freedom Party. He chose to overlook this. While he now tries to distance himself from the scandal-ridden Mr. Strache, claiming that “there were many situations” he found “difficult to swallow,” his new found indignation rings hollow. What’s worse is that the Freedom Party’s xenophobic and racist ideologies were not enough to turn Mr. Kurz against Mr. Strache. It took Mr. Strache to be caught red-handed selling out his country’s sovereignty to Russia — ironic for a party that, like the rest of the far right movement, has been banging the drum of national sovereignty in its campaign against Brussels. Let’s hope that with Mr. Strache’s cynicism laid bare, Mr. Kurz has learned his lesson.

Before the scandal, Austria’s approach to dealing with the far right seemed like a model other center right parties could follow. Now, Austria should serve as a warning call that the far-right parties cannot be “civilized” — or trusted.

Alina Polyakova (@apolyakova) is the David M. Rubenstein fellow for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, where she specializes in Russia, Europe, and the far right. She is the author of “The Dark Side of European Integration” and adjunct professor of European studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

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