The Austrian far-right has not found partners to try to form a government after winning the parliamentary elections last September without a majority, but it has placed one of its own at the head of Parliament for the first time. The new chamber, formed this Thursday, will be chaired by Walter Rosenkranz, of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), who was elected with 61.7% of the valid ballots in a secret ballot.
It is a tradition in the Austrian Parliament (183 seats) that it is headed by the party that wins the elections, with a second and third presidential position for the parties that follow it in the vote. But the election of Rosenkranz, a 62-year-old jurist who has been a member of the Ombudsman institution and the ultras’ presidential candidate in 2022, has been preceded by controversy because he is part of a brotherhood of former students with pan-German and anti-Semitic ideology. Several of these organizations have been involved in scandals for relativizing Nazi crimes.
For this reason, his appointment as the new president of the Chamber – number two in the State hierarchy behind the federal president – was criticized by the Greens, social democrats and by representatives of the Jewish community of Austria. However, the ultra candidate did not only have the support of his party, but the conservatives (ÖVP) announced that they would respect the unwritten rule of giving the position to the winners of the elections, so Rosenkranz has also foreseeably had the support votes of the traditional right. The vote in this case is secret and only the Greens announced a categorical rejection of the candidacy of the far-right deputy.
After his election, the new president of Parliament – who manages the progress of the Chamber and who represents it externally – assured that he will maintain all the initiatives of his predecessor, the Christian Democrat Wolfgang Sobotka, against anti-Semitism in Austria and in Europe.
The extreme right thus reaches one of the key positions in the Central European republic, but for the moment it is excluded from the next Government. The rest of the parties have refused to enter an Executive headed by the ultra leader, Herbert Kickl. The president of the country, the progressive Alexander Van der Bellen, in the face of the blockade, has commissioned the current chancellor and Christian Democrat leader, Karl Nehammer, who came second in the elections, to negotiate an agreement with the social democrats (SPÖ, third place) and a more “ecologist or liberal” partner to achieve a stable Executive.
