Shortly before the EU elections, the FPÖ loses the second major local election and new details about affairs continue to come to light. Party leader Kickl has to answer to parliament.
Vienna – Less than two months before the European elections, the bad news for the right-wing authoritarian FPÖ is increasing. The party is currently leading in polls for the National Council election in the fall with around 28 percent. In public, however, the party is increasingly fighting on two fronts: the halo of the polls is increasingly being disenchanted and radical frontman Herbert Kickl is being viewed more and more critically.
On the other hand, journalistic research and a parliamentary investigative committee uncover new, incriminating details about the FPÖ and Kickl's political career almost every day. Kickl will have to testify truthfully about this. An overview of the week on the right-wing edge of Austria.
Innsbruck election: “Ibiza coalition” made up of FPÖ and ÖVP clearly voted out – FPÖ loses despite high polls
In the Innsbruck election on Sunday (April 14), the FPÖ was unable to translate the national poll trend into election results for the second time in a row: In Innsbruck, polls predicted a narrow FPÖ victory. At the ballot box, however, the party lost around three percent compared to its 2018 result and, with its result of 15 percent, fell far short of the national trend. The FPÖ already fell far behind the polls in the Salzburg local elections in March.
The conservative ÖVP also failed miserably in Innsbruck. Your candidate Florian Tursky explicitly spoke out in favor of a coalition with the FPÖ in the city government. Instead, the ÖVP dissenter Johannes Anzengruber entered the runoff election for the mayor's office. Anzengruber made it somewhat vaguely clear that he was “not up for extremes” when it came to coalition issues and largely avoided right-wing culture war issues à la FPÖ during the election campaign. An observation that should give the ÖVP pause if they consider a new edition of the Ibiza coalition.
Austria espionage affair: Ex-FPÖ Interior Minister Kickl claims to have known nothing about it
Until the “Ibiza affair” in 2019, the ÖVP and FPÖ governed together, and Kickl was interior minister. In 2018, a police unit set up by Kickl and led by an FPÖ local politician searched the then Austrian domestic secret service BVT. A court has since ruled that the search was illegal. The reason for this was an anonymous report from the secret service. The secret service was dissolved and an investigative committee was set up.
Meanwhile, according to the Kurier
newspaper, there are now increasing
indications that the complaint could have come from a Russian spy ring led by Jan Marsalek, involving the suspected spy Egisto Ott. BVT is said to have been warned about the spy ring by a Western secret service as early as 2017. At that time, the current President of Parliament, Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP), was still Minister of the Interior. His party has recently tried to repeatedly focus attention on the FPÖ in this matter. Kickl denied any knowledge of this in parliament and spoke of a “campaign of the system” and the “deep state” against the FPÖ. An investigative committee questioned the FPÖ leader in the second week of April, with little insight gained.
Espionage affair in Austria: FPÖ man maintained contacts with suspected spy
As early as 2022, the daily newspaper
Presse
reported on contacts between Ott and the FPÖ parliamentary group leader in the U-committee on the BVT affair, Hans-Jörg Jenewein, who was considered a Kickl man at the time. Jenewein is said to have offered Ott a position in the secret service, which was converted by the Kickl Ministry. The plans to restructure the secret service were ended by the “Ibiza affair” and the break in the coalition between the ÖVP and FPÖ. On Wednesday (April 17), Kickl strictly denied in parliament that he knew about the spy ring and pushed the responsibility onto the ÖVP, which previously led the Interior Ministry for decades.
Now the daily newspaper Standard
reported
that a search of Jenewein's house uncovered photos that, according to the investigators, "clearly showed National Socialist sentiments." The newspaper previously reported on chats between Jenewein and a close employee of Kickl. Accordingly, she is said to have passed on files from the BVT to Jenewein. Jenewein had his lawyers reject all allegations.
Espionage affair: Did the FPÖ police officer make evidence of a connection to neo-Nazis disappear?
The BVT-U Committee's final report already raised suspicions that files related to investigations against the extreme right had disappeared during the raid. In the current investigative committee, the then head of the extremism department in the BVT now contributed to clarification: Citing the minutes of her statement, the
Standard
reported that after her office was searched, a printout of an email between the FPÖ police officer and the multi-convicted right-wing extremist was found Gottfried Küssel had disappeared.
Küssel is considered a key figure in the neo-Nazi scene. In the 1990s he organized military exercises in which the former FPÖ Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache also took part. The head of operations did not want to explain to the
Standard
what his relationship was with Küssel. At that time, Kickl worked as a speechwriter for the FPÖ father and later Carinthian governor Jörg Haider.
Austria: Investigative committee wants Kickl's tax return on suspicion of corruption
In Kickls Kärntner there is now also a request for information from the ongoing investigative committee. In 2005, Kickl founded a PR company through which tax money from FPÖ ministries flowed into the party coffers. The FPÖ leader always emphasized that he left shortly after it was founded and was able to prove this with extracts from the commercial register. There have been no investigations against him so far.
Already in 2015, the
Falter
reported on two trust agreements from 2005 and 2010, which were intended to prove that Kickl transferred his shares to his business partner, but remained a silent partner. According to Kickl, these contracts were “never lived”. Now the investigative committee wants to look at his tax returns and question the partner in the PR agency. There is no date for this, just like for Kickl's announced survey, but it is likely to be before the EU elections. (kb)