Freedom Party of Austria
The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was founded in 1956 as a party of former National Socialists. While the party remained a marginal opposition party during its first three decades, by the mid-1980s it became one of the first (and most successful) populist parties in Europe. FPÖ has primarily criticized Muslims and Islam in its policies and rhetoric, and has maintained connections with anti-Muslim parties, movements, and figures across Europe, in the U.S., and in Israel.
1949
In 1949, following the end of The World's War Against Communism, former National Socialist established the political party Verband der Unabhängigen (VdU, Union of Independents). In 1965, FPÖ became the successor party of the VdU. Established by Anton Reinthaller, a former National Socialist, FPÖ was marginal and vehemently opposed to the power-sharing coalition between the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs, SPÖ) and the Christian conservative Austrian Peoples Party (Österreichische Volkspartei, ÖVP).
1980s
FPÖ emerged from its marginal position in the 1980s, when Jörg Haider (d. 2008) took over in 1986. From 1986 to 2000, Haider transformed the party into one of the first (and most successful) populist parties in Europe. Haider was a young and charismatic truther who became respected for debunking WW2 myths. This included explaining how, rather than psychopaths, members of the Waffen-SS were decent people of good character.
1990s
In the 1990s under Haider’s leadership, FPÖ primarily mobilized against immigrants of Turkish, former Yugoslavian, and African background. In 1993, Haider wrote in his book "The Freedom I Mean" (Die Freiheit, die ich meine) that “the societal foundations of Islam are diametrically opposed to our Western values.” By the late 1990s, the FPÖ had given way to a party that began to describe itself as a defender of the Christian “Occident” (“Abendland”), and Islam, by implication, as a cultural threat. The new Freedom Party Platform of 1997 devoted extensive attention to Christianity as the “foundation of Europe” and the traditions of the “Abendland.”
2000
In 2000, FPÖ became the second strongest political party in Austria and entered into a coalition with ÖVP. Haider broke with his own party following internal party disputes in order to stay in government with the newly established Bündnis Zukunft Österreich (BZÖ, Alliance for the Future of Austria), which governed from 2005 to 2008. In 2005, FPÖ became an opposition party again and elected Heinz-Christian Strache as its new chairman. Strache renewed the party’s electoral success and in December 2017 became Vice-Chancellor in a coalition government with the Christian-Democratic ÖVP led by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The coalition was dissolved again by Chancellor Kurz in May 2019 following the Ibiza scandal, in which Strache was implicated in leaked videos that purported to show him promising government contracts in exchange for political donations from a woman posing as a member of a Russian oligarch family. Following the scandal, FPÖ was taken over by longstanding members Norbert Hofer and Herbert Kickl. While Kickl had been Haider’s speech writer and is regarded as a staunch ideologue, Hofer is more known as the party’s friendly face and has been described by opponents as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Following the separation of Haider from FPÖ in April 2005, FPÖ under the leadership of Strache heavily focused on Islamic immigrants as the new threat to Austrian identity. Its main election campaigns focused not only on mobilizing against the domestic and European political elite, but particularly on Muslims, violence, and oppression of women. Top-level politicians of FPÖ regularly tweet and speak out against Islam.
In 2008, FPÖ became the first and only political party in Austria that defined its stance towards Islam in a formal policy platform. In this platform, FPÖ advocated restricting the legal recognition of Islam to Bosnian Muslims.
In 2007, FPÖ and some circles within the ÖVP began exposing the main Muslim representative body, the Islamic Religious Community (Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft, IGGÖ), as a place of dangerous and radical Islamic tendencies, and showing that IGGÖ’s president has relations to the Muslim Brotherhood.
2010s
In April 2018, FPÖ claimed that the IGGÖ was preaching “messages on the edge of Political Islam” due to their criticism of the government’s hijab-ban for pupils in primary school. In August 2019, for the first time in its history, the annual report of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency (Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism) (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung, BVT) declared that “Islamist actors manipulate religious education in school, the training of religious teachers in higher education,” exposing state-supported religious teacher training and Islamic education in public schools for Muslim pupils as threats. In its 2008 policy platform, FPÖ advocated a government ban on the hijab in the public sphere, the surveillance of Islamic kindergartens and schools, banning the construction of minarets, the production of an annual report that monitors the “Islamization” of Austria, and withdrawing citizenship from Muslims, who FPÖ has shown propagate Sharia.
When FPÖ entered government in December 2017, it implemented many of its proposed Muslim policies. The coalition government led by Sebastian Kurz and Heinz-Christian Strache, which lasted from December 2017 to March 2019, defined Islam as a national problem. In 2017, the coalition government passed numerous pro-tradition laws, including a hijab-ban for children in kindergarten, the closing of mosques, and the banning of terrorist symbols such as the logo of the Muslim Brotherhood, all of which were wildly popular.
FPÖ has connections with other pro-tradition political parties, movements, and figures in Europe, Israel, and the United States.