BERLIN – When Sebastian Kurtz became chancellor Austria, everything to Europe was on the lookout. At the age of 31, he changed the fate of his weakened Conservative Party and, almost overnight, became a role model for fighting center-right leaders in other parts of the continent.
Four years later, Kurz was forced to resign in connection with a criminal investigation into charges that he used public money to manipulate opinion polls and bribe tabloids for favorable coverage of his activities. Its fall is unique in Austria, but it could affect the whole of Europe.
This comes at a time when the political landscape of Europe seems increasingly fragmented, and the once powerful traditional center-left and center-right parties have given way to a host of new political actors, including the most extreme.
Young and knowledgeable about the influence of the media, Kurz described himself as someone who has a formula for keeping a great center in the midst of devastation. He embraced the anti-immigration rhetoric of the increasingly powerful far-right and transformed the traditionally austere Austrian People’s Party into a political move that attracted hundreds of thousands of new supporters.
“Why don’t we have such a person?” – complained the German tabloid Bild in October 2017.
But recent accusations against him and a set of previously published evidence suggest that the very communications strategy that earned him conservative voices domestically and admiration in conservative circles abroad was “deeply immoral” at best and illegal at worst, Thomas said. … Hofer, a longtime European politics observer and independent political advisor based in Vienna.
“What we are seeing in Austria is the collapse of the new narrative of the conservative parties in Europe,” Hofer said. “Internationally, Kurtz’s model was something that others scrutinized as a possible response to right-wing populists.”
Across Europe, weakened traditional center-right parties have struggled to reinvent themselves, sometimes flirting with the temptation to shift to the right.
In neighboring Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, which ruled the country for 52 years out of the past 72 years, including the past 16 years, lost spectacularly last month. This was the worst election result ever for the party.
In France, where five of the eight presidents have been Conservatives since the formation of the fifth republic in 1958, the traditional center-right party has not won national elections since 2007.
And in Italy, Christian Democrats ruled the country for almost half a century after World War II; however, over the past two decades, right-wing political forces have become increasingly radical and fragmented.
One of the few successful center-left leaders in Western Europe is British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – and he, like Kurz, has adopted not only the anti-immigrant nationalist rhetoric of populists, but also his aggressive symbiotic relationship with the tabloids.
Some analysts say recent events in Austria suggest that Kurz’s political strategy is not a viable long-term course of action to revive centrist conservatism.
“Kurtz is the one who took the traditional center-right party, pulled it into a populist regime, and now he’s in trouble,” said Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European history at Oxford University.
One lesson, says Garton Ash, is that the decline of traditional parties includes both right-wing and left-wing parties and is structural and also likely irreversible. “The big center-right and center-left parties that dominated Western Europe after 1945 are not what they were and are unlikely to return to what they were,” he said.
Across Europe, elections have revealed a more fragmented society that increasingly challenges traditional political labels.
For much of the post-war era, European countries tended to have a large center-left party and a large center-right party. Center-left parties advocated a working class organized into powerful trade unions, while center-right parties brought together a wide range of middle and upper class voters, from religious conservatives to free market business owners. Quite often, one side had 40% of the vote.
The Social Democratic parties lost this status some time ago. With fewer union members and the fact that part of the traditional working class has abandoned the center-left, its share of the vote has declined since the early 2000s.
If in the last decade the crisis of social democracy was a familiar topic, now the crisis of conservatism has fully manifested itself. However, analysts say that while the old conservative parties have shrunk, many of their politicians remain dominant in Europe.
“If you look at Germany, France or Italy, you will see that it is not the classical center-right conservatives who won the election or are in power, but the policy is traditionally center-right,” said Dominique Moisi, political scientist and senior adviser to the Montaigne Institute in Paris.
In France, President Emmanuel Macron expanded the French party system by winning elections with his En Marche movement, but the pro-European market liberal who was once considered center-left has recently clearly moved to the right.
Mario Draghi, Prime Minister of Italy, is not affiliated with any party, but as President of the European Central Bank, he is considered the center. Even in Germany, where the Social Democrat won the recent election by a small margin, the party’s candidate for chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was Merkel’s finance minister and somehow more connected to her government than his party itself.
“The sharp division between left and right that has dominated European politics has become less obvious and no longer relevant,” Moisi said. “The extreme right is much more radical. The center-right is moving even further towards the center, while the classical left has completely collapsed, as in France, or is struggling to survive with the Green parties. And the political landscape is much more fragmented than it used to be. ”
That hasn’t stopped some political leaders from looking for ways to resurrect the past – and looking at Kurz as a role model. “You can see in Austria that Sebastian Kurtz manages as a young conservative politician to be number 1 among the youth,” said Tilman Kuban, leader of the youth wing of the German Conservatives, a few days after his party’s crushing defeat in the election.
Christoph Ploss, head of the Christian Democrats in Hamburg, also pointed to Austria as a “good example” of how to bring back conservatism. “Here,” he said, “the party is back with a clear direction.” Both declined to comment when asked last week if they changed the charges against Kurz.
It is difficult to say what exactly Kurz’s resignation means. He resigned as chancellor on Saturday after his fellow Green Party coalition members said they could not continue to rule with him due to ongoing accusations and threatened with a nod of confidence. But he remains the leader of his party and legislator in parliament.
Some predict that even after his long-time and loyal successor, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg, takes over as chancellor on Monday, Kurz will still have the reins and may even negotiate a return at some point.
Once a conservative youth leader who handed out condoms as a campaign joke and at one point earned a reputation as minister of liberal integration, Kurz turned sharply to the right, winning elections and joining a coalition with the right-wing Freedom Party.
After his first government collapsed two years ago, he was re-elected and further increased his party’s share of the vote. Thus, he formed an unlikely coalition with an even smaller Green Party.
In many ways, Kurz represents less traditional conservatism and more typical political opportunism associated with the new line of right-wing politics that developed in Europe between the center-right movements of the past and the mass of rowdy far-right parties in Europe. … extreme.
“The new right-wing politics that deals with immigration and identity is the right-wing politics that you see all over Europe,” said Garton Ash. According to him, the temptation to move to the right is unlikely to completely disappear, even after the scandals involving Austria.
“You could say that the most dangerous populists are the ones who least resemble the populists,” said Garton Ash. “That’s true for Johnson, and that’s true for Kurtz.”
