Vienna
The Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) has a bit of international notoriety, thanks to the rhetorical provocations that its late leader Jörg Haider used to issue about his country’s Nazi past. Before he died in 2008 while driving drunk between a gay bar he allegedly favored and his mother’s 90th birthday party, he would, for instance, describe the Waffen SS as “honorable men.” One can debate what Haider meant by these things, but not their reception in the country’s capital. They went down like poison in “Red” Vienna, Western Europe’s most left-wing city, where Social Democrats have ruled without a pause since 1945. Vienna never votes for parties like Haider’s. Something must be going on, then, because on October 11, the Viennese gave the FPÖ, now led by Haider’s onetime rival Heinz-Christian Strache, almost a third of the vote. Two weeks before that, Strache’s party doubled its score in Upper Austria, tallying more than 30 percent.

Strache cannot claim the credit. An earnest dental technician, he had a hard time firing up crowds in Vienna’s Leopold-Mistiger-Platz when he spoke there a week before the election. He’s querulous. If Haider’s speeches were tirades, Strache’s are more like tizzies. Nor is the country generally drifting towards the FPÖ’s platform, to judge from Strache’s mumbled support for the principle of equal pay for women. The earthquake in Austrian politics is explained by one thing alone: Shortly before the Upper Austria elections, 61 percent of voters told pollsters they were preoccupied with “refugees and asylum.” No other issue came close.