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FPÖ boss Kickl waves the flag of Austria: "Simple people are simple, but they are not stupid"
Photo: Daniel Novotny / EPA
The right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has a new party leader: Herbert Kickl.
The 52-year-old former interior minister, known for his sharply right-wing rhetoric, received 88.2 percent of the delegates' votes in the election for party leader at an extraordinary federal party conference in Wiener Neustadt.
His predecessor Norbert Hofer was elected with 98 percent of the vote in 2019.
The FPÖ parliamentary group leader Kickl is considered the party's longstanding chief thinker.
The former Minister of the Interior of Austria once campaigned, among other things, to keep refugees "concentrated" in one place.
When legal experts criticized Kickl's proposal for deportation without the rule of law, he formulated his principle "that the law has to follow the policy and not the policy has to follow the law."
Kickl renamed initial reception centers for asylum seekers to »exit centers« during his tenure as Minister of the Interior.
Most recently, he saw the content of his party overlap with the Identitarian Movement.
Late consequences from Ibiza
After the Ibiza affair, in which ex-FPÖ boss Heinz-Christian Strache showed himself willing to corrupt in front of hidden cameras, the coalition with the ÖVP broke up - and Kickl had to go as interior minister. Since then, party leader Norbert Hofer has tried to make the party more attractive to swing voters through a more moderate demeanor. However, he lost the power struggle with Herbert Kickl after the most recent clashes. At the party congress, Hofer was nevertheless conciliatory and announced his support for Kickl. In surveys, the FPÖ currently comes to around 16 percent. The state elections in Upper Austria in September will be a first mood test.
In his speech, Kickl spread confidence: "We're playing to win," he called out to the delegates.
At the same time, the politician, who grew up in a workers' settlement in Carinthia, called respect for ordinary people a central wisdom of life.
"Simple people are simple, but they are not stupid." Kickl renewed his sharp criticism of the former coalition partner ÖVP and its boss, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
The ÖVP is in a threatening position due to the growing rumor in the federal states about the public prosecutor's investigations against Kurz and Finance Minister Gernot Blümel.
Even Kurz himself is no longer safe, said Kickl.
Too radical for the government?
It is questionable whether the FPÖ will benefit from the weakness of the People's Party. With his verbal attacks against migrants and Islam, Kickl addresses the FPÖ's core clientele, but can hardly win supporters from other parties for the right-wing populists. A new edition of the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition is also ruled out because of the deep gap between Kurz and Kickl. None of the other parties want to make a deal with the right-wing populists anyway.
The FPÖ has been part of the political landscape in Austria for decades, with some high approval levels in elections. She became internationally known through the appearances of the party leader Jörg Haider, who died in an accident in 2008 and who headed the party from 1986 to 2000. Kickl had once written speeches for the former governor of Carinthia, including anti-Semitic passages about the President of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Ariel Muzicant ("How can someone called Ariel have so much dirt on the stick?") And was responsible for the FPÖ's racist campaign slogans, For example: "Viennese blood - too much foreignness does no one good."
The outgoing FPÖ boss Hofer defended Kickl several times for his statements and called him a "humanist" and a "philosopher".
In fact, Kickl began studying philosophy and history in 1989 - but never graduated.
rai / dpa
