Talks to form the government of Austria broke down in Vienna on Wednesday after parties failed to form a coalition.
For the first time, the talks were being led by the Freedom Party (FPO) as the senior member in negotiations after it came first in the parliamentary elections held in September 2024.
In that poll, the party took just shy of 29 percent of the vote, knocking then Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party (OVP) into second place.
Despite coming first, the Euroskeptic, anti-immigration FPO was only tasked with beginning talks last month after Australian President Alexander Van der Bellen gave Nehammer the first chance to form a new government.
This move was made after the OVP said it wouldn’t go into government with the FPO with its leader, Herbert Kickl, at its helm, while other parties refused to work with the FPO at all, accusing the party of being “far-right,” particularly due to its opposition to European Union sanctions on Russian gas.
After attempts to form a government without the FPO collapsed in the first few days of January, Nehammer announced his resignation and Van der Bellen announced the FPO would have the chance to form a coalition after a meeting with Kickl on Jan. 6.
The FPO had initially planned to reach an agreement with the OVP quickly due to their political overlap on many issues, particularly immigration.
The parties had governed together before, but on those occasions, it was always the FPO that was the junior partner.
Most recently, they ran Austria from 2017 to 2019 in a government in which Kickl served as interior minister.
But divisions deepened and the discussion eventually fractured after other issues of policy and personnel could not be agreed upon.
This meant that after more than a month, negotiations between the FPO and OVP broke down, with each side blaming the other, and Kickl meeting Van der Bellen to formally hand back the mandate to form a government.
“Although we made concessions to the OVP on many points in the subsequent talks, the negotiations were ultimately unsuccessful, much to our regret.”
He went on to say that he didn’t believe negotiations with the Social Democratic Party (SPO) would be effective, adding that preliminary talks with SPO leader Andreas Babler “have shown that not only are our positions far apart on crucial points, but the SPO basically takes a negative position on any cooperation with the FPO.”
A parliamentary inquiry found that senior officials at the Interior Ministry, then headed by Kickl, played a role in pushing prosecutors to sign off on the raid.
“It is out of the question that we will compromise the security of the country,” Stocker said, adding that negotiations had collapsed because of Kickl’s attitude, saying the FPO leader had only been present for seven hours of the five-week negotiations.
The OVP also said the FPO had not addressed its demand that fundamental matters be guaranteed, such as the rule of law, no influence from Moscow, and Austria being a “reliable partner to the European Union.”
What happens next is up to Van der Bellen, but the two most likely outcomes are that a centrist attempt to form a government will be attempted again, or a snap election will be called.
