After five months of roller-coaster conversations following an election next fall, three major political parties in Austria announced on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to form a new state that excludes the far right.
It was an improbable return for a different political coalition that had been torn up by policy conflict when it attempted to form a government earlier this year but was unsuccessful.
And it was a terrible loss for the Freedom Party, which came in second place in the election last year on the heels of an anti-establishment, anti-immigrant strategy and was just about to elect Austria’s second far-right chancellor in the postwar period. No group managed to eke out a majority of the parliament’s chairs or votes.
The good new chancellor, Christian Stocker, will otherwise come from the center-right party that has led the nation for most of the past seven years: the People’s Party, which finished next in the September elections, as voters punished it for a string of corruption scandals that typically occurred years back.
The Viennese Social Democrats and the center-right NEOS gathering are expected to take the helm of the first three-party partnership in a government in Austria. Friday, the coalition will make governmental visits public.
The Freedom Party, which was established by previous Nazi military in the 1950s but lost in its own attempt to form a state earlier this year, is frozen out of the public eye.
The new administration may begin on thin ice. Since last drop, the Freedom Party has attracted the support of a third of the population, which is only expected to increase.
According to polls, Austrians are still irritated by an economy that has been in recession for the past two years and are concerned about immigration, mainly from predominantly Muslim nations. In its most recent campaign, the Freedom Party made both a key concern and a call for a ban on social aspects of Islam.
The new authorities said it would soften its stance on immigration by forbidding asylum-seekers from bringing their families, and that it would also outlaw headscarves for girls younger than 18 in a nod to those concerns.
” We are fair: These are going to be difficult times, two hard times”, said Beate Meinl-Reisinger, the mind of NEOS. ” We are in a tough financial position, we are in a tough fiscal situation”, she said.
