We don’t hear much about Austrian politics in Britain, which is not perhaps surprising since the landlocked Central European republic of some nine million souls, is scarcely a major player on Europe’s chessboard. Nonetheless Austria, like Britain, will hold elections this year, and a populist party with Nazi roots looks certain to emerge with the most votes.

On Friday, thousands of young Austrians took to the streets of Vienna and Salzburg in demonstrations spilling over from neighbouring Germany against the rise of right-wing anti immigration parties in both countries. They were specifically protesting about a recent meeting of far-right activists near Berlin that discussed a plan to deport migrants to their countries of origin.

Kickl has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia

On the streets of Vienna, it’s not hard to discern the issue that has propelled the Freedom Party (FPÖ) to outstrip it’s traditional socialist and conservative rivals to win a standing of 30 percentage points, according to current polls.That issue – as elsewhere in Europe, where populist parties are riding high – is immigration.

Like Austria’s mighty German neighbour, where another right-wing party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), is also rising, the ascent of the FPÖ sends shivers down the spines of some onlookers because of the country’s 20th century history. For the FPÖ began life back in the 1950s as a home for former Nazis who didn’t support either the Socialist ‘Reds’ in the capital Vienna, or the conservative Catholic ‘Blacks’ in the countryside.

At first, the FPÖ affected to be a ‘Liberal’ third force, but in the late 1980s a charismatic and controversial young politician called Jorg Haider took over the party and pulled it sharply to the right. Haider’s parents had both been Nazi party members, and he made little secret that his own sympathies tended in a similar direction, attending reunions where former SS men were present, and praising Hitler for getting rid of unemployment.

When I worked in Vienna as a journalist in the 1990s, Haider was the enfant terrible, constantly disrupting the cosy consensus that had divvied up Austrian politics since 1945. For decades, the Reds and the Blacks had held an agreed balance of jobs in every walk of life in a system known as ‘proporz’. My boss in Austrian state radio was a ‘Red’ but his deputy was a ‘Black’.

Although Vienna is classed as one of the safest cities in Europe, it is the only one where I have witnessed a murder by one immigrant of another with my own eyes. In 1999, largely fuelled by concerns over immigration, the FPÖ gained a quarter of the electorate’s votes, and were admitted to government as junior partners to the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP).

Although Haider did not personally join the government, the right-wing coalition caused vapours in Brussels. Austria was labelled as a pariah state. The prospect of EU economic sanctions loomed over Vienna in a manner which would become familiar in Poland and Hungary when they elected right-wing governments twenty years later. Austria, where civic courage has never been much of a virtue, bowed to the pressure and the coalition crumbled.

Always an abrasive personality, Haider split from the FPÖ and formed a breakaway party. In 2008, after a heavy drinking session, he died in a car accident in the southern province of Carinthia, where he was governor.

Reunited under a new leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ once again climbed steadily in the polls, and Strache became vice chancellor in a new coalition with the ÖVP in 2017. In 2019, Strache, while on holiday in Ibiza, was caught up in a sting in which the politician was recorded offering government contracts to a fake journalist in exchange for favourable publicity for his party. The FPÖ chief resigned in disgrace and another ÖVP-FPÖ coalition collapsed.

Five years on, and once again the FPÖ have returned from the depths of Ibiza-gate under a new chief called Herbert Kickl to enjoy a sustained lead in the polls over their rivals. Kickl, who was a speechwriter for Haider, was a notably hardline interior minister in the 2017-19 coalition, opining that Islam is incompatible with other cultures, proclaiming that his goal was to make it almost impossible for asylum seekers to settle in Austria, and trying to rename immigrants’ hostels as ‘departure centres’.

Like many of Europe’s ultra-right leaders, Kickl also has a soft spot for Putin’s Russia. In the pandemic, he took a strong anti-vaccine line. But if, as expected, his party comes out on top in this autumn’s elections, Austria’s Green president, Alexander van den Bellen – who dismissed Kickl when he was a minister over the Ibiza scandal – will be constitutionally obliged to name him chancellor, possibly in a new coalition, this time with the FPÖ as senior partners to the ÖVP.

Austrian politics mirror those in Germany, where last week thousands took part in protests after AfD members attended a meeting at which a plan for the mass deportation of migrants was discussed. One of the meeting’s attendees was Austria’s Martin Sellner, a Kickl supporter and co-founder of the European Identitarian movement which advocates white Christian culture and opposes mass migration.

Attitudes in Austria towards mass migration have hardened considerably in recent years, as they have across the rest of Europe. My son, who lives in Vienna, is a gentle giant with his own bodybuilding business. At the age of 30, he’ll vote for the first time. He is no fan of Kickl but is likely to back him anyway. The reason why is simple enough: Kickl is, at least, willing to crack down on an asylum policy that many Viennese think is far too liberal.