International Courant
Austrian Chancellor and head of the Austrian Individuals’s Occasion (OeVP) Karl Nehammer (L) and chairman and high candidate of the Austrian Freedom Occasion (FPOe) Herbert Kickl (R) meet throughout their pre-election TV debate organized by the Austrian State Community ORF in Vienna, Austria on September 23, 2024.
Joe Klamar | Episode | Getty Pictures
The chief of Austria’s far-right Freedom Occasion (FPO), Herbert Kickl, vowed on Friday to win this weekend’s parliamentary elections, which might be a historic first whilst opinion polls present the race is now too near occur.
Kickl’s FPO has doggedly targeted on immigration grievances and has held a transparent lead within the polls for greater than a 12 months, helped by voter frustration over above-average inflation within the European Union and Austria’s failing financial system.
Nevertheless, Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian Individuals’s Occasion (OVP) has closed the hole to throughout the margin of error, because the OVP tried to painting him as a statesman, in distinction to the customarily abrasive and polarizing Kickl.
“The individuals are the wind at our backs and the system is our headwind and the individuals are all the time stronger than the system, and we’ll show that on Sunday,” Kickl, 55, mentioned in a usually populist speech on the finish. marketing campaign occasion for St. Stephen’s Cathedral within the coronary heart of Vienna.
“This time we will probably be No. 1,” he mentioned, underlining that it could be the primary time the occasion based within the Nineteen Fifties would win parliamentary elections. It achieved its first nationwide victory this 12 months when it defeated the OVP by lower than a share level in June’s European elections.
Individuals stroll previous election marketing campaign billboards that includes Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer of the Austrian Individuals’s Occasion (OeVP) and Herbet Kickl of the far-right Austria Freedom Occasion (FPOe) on September 24, 2024 in Vienna, Austria. There will probably be parliamentary elections in Austria on September 29.
Thomas Kronsteiner | Getty Pictures Information | Getty Pictures
Though the variety of new arrivals has fallen over the previous 12 months, Kickl has promised robust measures to forestall migrants from getting into landlocked Austria, resembling making a ‘Fortress Austria’ that pushes individuals again on the border, and ending granting of asylum.
The FPO and the OVP overlap on different features of immigration and financial points resembling tax cuts, however Nehammer has portrayed Kickl as an extremist and says he’s open to a coalition with the FPO however that his occasion is not going to be part of a authorities with Kick it in.
Nehammer himself might have benefited from his stewardship within the response to the extreme floods that hit Austria this month.
Whoever wins, they are going to be far wanting an absolute majority and can want a coalition associate to kind a steady authorities. The FPO’s solely obvious possibility could be the OVP, whereas the OVP may flip to the FPO or probably kind a three-way alliance with the Social Democrats and a smaller occasion.
In an obvious swipe at Kickl, Nehammer informed a closing assembly that he and his occasion stood “for the politics of the middle, in opposition to the unconventional, for stability as an alternative of chaos. We don’t stay from issues, we remedy them.”
