Austrian far right pledges to win election as tight race winds up

The leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), Herbert Kickl, pledged on Friday to win this weekend’s parliamentary election in what would be a historic first, even as opinion polls show the race is now too close to call.

Doggedly keeping grievances about immigration in focus, Kickl’s FPO has had a clear lead in polls for more than a year, helped by voters’ frustration with inflation above the European Union average and Austria’s misfiring economy.

Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP), however, has closed the gap to within the margin of error, as the OVP sought to present him as a statesman in contrast to the often abrasive and polarizing Kickl.

“The people are the wind at our backs and the system is our headwind and the people are always stronger than the system, and we will prove it on Sunday,” the 55-year-old Kickl said in a typically populist address at a closing campaign event in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the heart of Vienna.

“This time we will be number 1,” he said, underscoring the fact that it would be the first time the party founded in the 1950s had won a parliamentary election. It secured its first national victory this year when it beat the OVP by less than a percentage point in June’s European election.

Although new arrivals have plummeted in the past year, Kickl has pledged tough measures to prevent migrants from entering landlocked Austria, such as creating a “Fortress Austria” that forces people back at the border, and stopping granting asylum.

The FPO and OVP overlap on other aspects of immigration and economic issues like tax cuts, but Nehammer has depicted Kickl as an extremist, saying he is open to a coalition with the FPO but his party will not enter a government with Kickl in it.

Nehammer himself has possibly benefited from his stewardship of the response to severe flooding that hit Austria this month.

Whoever wins, they will fall far short of an absolute majority and will need a coalition partner to form a stable government. The FPO’s only apparent option would be the OVP, while the OVP could turn to the FPO or potentially form a three-way alliance with the Social Democrats and a smaller party.

In a clear swipe at Kickl, Nehammer told a closing rally that he and his party stood “for the politics of the centre, against the radical, for stability instead of chaos. We do not live off of problems, we solve them.”