What’s the matter with Austria?

Last week’s presidential election saw the wealthy Alpine republic evenly split between two fringe candidates. Alexander Van der Bellen, the Green, beat his far-Right rival, Norbert Hofer, by just 31,000 votes out of 4.64 million cast.

Obviously, in Europe’s current climate, only Mr. Hofer is called an extremist. To believe, as the Greens do, that the human race took a wrong turn when it discovered agriculture, is treated as a harmless eccentricity.

The entire establishment — in Brussels as well as Vienna — piled in behind Mr. Van der Bellen, with Jean-Claude Juncker, the unelected president of the European Commission, insisting that there must be “no debate or dialogue with the far Right”.

In fact, though, 100 percent of Austrian voters backed extremist candidates. The traditional parties of government, the Center-Right Austrian People’s Party and the Center-Left Social Democratic Party, failed to make it into the run-off.

It’s a pattern we’re seeing all over Europe. Mainstream parties are bleeding support to insurgents. Sometimes, the insurgents come from the Right, as in Hungary and Sweden. Sometimes, they come from the Left, as in Spain and Greece. Sometimes, they are hard to classify.

France’s National Front, which won the last national poll there, is habitually labeled “far Right,” but, on most economic issues, is well to the left of the Socialists. Italy’s Five Star Movement, led by the stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo, is anti-capitalist, anti-euro, anti-immigration, anti-growth and anti-war. Incredibly, some polls now show it, too, in first place.

What is going on? The conventional answer is that extremism arises from economic failure. Just as the 1930s destroyed the democratic consensus in Europe, runs the argument, so the 2008 crash, which condemned tens of millions of Europeans to joblessness, squalor and emigration, has sent people scurrying to the edges of the spectrum.

But this analysis doesn’t apply to Austria. According to the OECD, GDP per capita there is a whopping $48,177 — a third higher than in neighboring Italy and nearly twice as much as in Greece. Unemployment is 5.7 percent, compared to 11.9 percent in Italy and 24.9 percent in Greece.

Austria’s prosperity, indeed, is something of a mystery to free-marketeers, including this author. The country is run on corporatist lines, with high taxes and big budgets, powerful trade unions and a regulated labor market. Yet it is booming. Some economists put its success down to geography: Vienna was exceptionally well placed to benefit when the nearby Warsaw Pact states transitioned from communism.

Others credit a pragmatic education system that emphasizes workplace skills. Still others argue that Austria freed up huge sums of money by having almost no military budget after 1945.

Whatever the explanation, Austria is flourishing. So why the collapse of mainstream politics? Because voters know that they have lost control of the two most critical areas of national life: borders and money. Both have passed from accountable national politicians to unelected Brussels functionaries.

Austria is directly in the path of the main migrant route into the European border-free area, and has seen vast population movements across its territory over the past 12 months. Understandably, some voters blame the parties that created that border-free zone in the first place, blithely swatting aside all concerns as distractions from the goal of a federal Europe.

The same is true of the euro. Although monetary union has not immiserated Austrians as it has Italians and Greeks, it has left them on the hook for billions of euros in bailouts which no one seriously expects to be repaid. Austrian voters, like others throughout the eurozone, are learning that they can do absolutely nothing about it. As John Maynard Keynes put it, “He who controls the currency controls the government”.

Understandably, there is resentment throughout Europe against the politicians who created the mess. The parties responsible — which is to say pretty much everyone except the fringes — refuse even now to admit their mistake, and respond to the euro and migration crises, as they respond to everything: by demanding even more European integration.

Which raises an interesting question. Who are the extremists here? The traditional parties represent what we might call “the extreme Center”: those politicians who, rather than admit that the old EU consensus has failed, continue to demand more of the medicine that sickened the patient in the first place.

There is no more stubborn creature on Earth than the Euro-liberal convinced of his own broad-mindedness. Voters are finally rumbling him.

Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.