Should we have seen it coming? With the benefit of hindsight, Donald Trump’s victory seems to have been inevitable, and the excitement of journalists reporting a closely contested presidential election akin to that of cricket commentators talking up the losing side to prevent their audience switching off the radio. And those of us who were confident that a majority of the electorate would not vote for somebody as deranged and dangerous as Trump were turning a blind eye to how appealing his hateful rhetoric is.
The election of Trump shouldn’t have been unexpected also because it’s part of a broader trend in Western democracies. Over the past three years or so, far-right candidates and parties have been doing exceptionally well. Think of Italy just over two years ago, when Giorgia Meloni of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia was swept to power, and Argentina, where a chainsaw-wielding extremist became president in 2023.
In countries supposedly bucking the trend, such as Poland and Britain, recent elections were won by centrist or left-leaning parties that are no longer committed to social and climate justice and to upholding the rights of refugees and other migrants. Britain’s Keir Starmer has been cosying up to Meloni because he appears to hope that Italy’s proposed extraterritorial processing of asylum seekers could provide a blueprint for his own endeavour to “stop the boats.” And in October the Polish government of Donald Tusk announced that it will suspend the right to claim asylum, supposedly in order to combat “illegal migration.” That the EU backed the Polish plan adds to the evidence.
Austria is another case in point. At the parliamentary elections on 29 September 2024, the far-right Freedom Party came first with 28.8 per cent of the vote, its best-ever result. Its leader Herbert Kickl worked as a speech writer for the charismatic Jörg Haider in the early 2000s and was interior minister between 2017 and 2019.
As a member of federal cabinet, Kickl ordered a raid of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency, presumably in an attempt to shield extremist groups associated with his party from scrutiny. He has been critical of the European Convention on Human Rights, once proposed a 10pm–6am curfew for asylum-seekers and argued for their preventive detention. During the Covid-19 pandemic he opposed vaccinations and the mandatory use of masks. He didn’t want Austria to accommodate refugees from Ukraine, and has called for an end to the sanctions against Russia.
The Freedom Party’s results in late September should have been even less of a surprise than the outcome of the US elections six weeks later. Kickl’s party had consistently led the polls since late 2022, well ahead of the Social Democrats and the governing People’s Party. For more than eighteen months, the 2024 election loomed as a turning point, because it was widely assumed that in its wake the Austrian president would have little choice but to task Kickl with forming a government.
In early 2023, facing the realistic prospect of a government led by the far right, two of Austria’s leading theatre companies commissioned the playwright Thomas Köck to keep a diary during the year leading up to the election. A play based on that diary and directed by Marie Bues premiered in Graz on 22 September and in Vienna four days later. The diary itself, which covers exactly one year from 5 June 2023, was published at the same time.
Köck, who lived in Berlin for most of that year, used the diary to chronicle and comment on current affairs, particularly in Austria. “This is a running conversation with the present, against a future in which a far-right politician might be ask to lead a government,” he noted on 9 June 2023. Only ever referring to Kickl’s first name, Köck called this prospect the herbertkomplex.
Unlike many other commentators in the media, Köck did not conceive of the herbertkomplex as a looming seismic shift. Rather, he claims, the Austrian political landscape began to change markedly from the 1980s. In 1983, having polled less than 5 per cent of the popular vote, the Freedom Party had a first taste of government when it joined a coalition led by the Social Democrats. It was a liberal party at the time, although some of its founders in the 1950s had been unreconstructed Nazis. But in 1986 Haider burst onto the scene, took over as leader from the liberal Walter Steger and moved the party to the far right.
Haider was based in the southern state of Carinthia, where he became Landeshauptmann (state premier) in 1989. He teased the political establishment by constantly violating taboos. In the long run, his purported slip-ups, such as praise for Austria’s Nazi past, extended the boundaries of legitimate political discourse. His rhetorical strategies were later successfully emulated by other far right politicians, including Kickl and, in Germany, Björn Höcke and other leaders of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Köck chronicles such purported slip-ups. He also shows that the herbertkomplex relies on the collusion of centre-left and centre-right parties. In the mistaken belief that they need to pander to the far right’s voters, they adopt some of its policies and, more importantly, its vocabulary, thereby normalising both. In Austria, this happened as early as 1990, when the Social Democrats first tried to gain political mileage by scapegoating foreigners.
I expected Köck’s chronicle to show how Austria’s public discourse evolved over a period of twelve months. But his book is not about change. Kickl was ahead in the polls when Köck began writing his diary, and he was still ahead a year later. We are probably seeing a marked shift in public sentiment, particularly towards issues of migration and asylum, in the United States, Germany and France. But in Austria, the normalisation of the rhetoric of the far right, particularly when it comes to issues of migration and asylum, happened well before 2023. Incidentally, the same is true for Australia.
In Austria, Köck suggests, the dog whistle has become redundant. It’s no longer necessary to allude, to experiment with language in an attempt to identify the words that can be spoken. Rather, the far right’s intention “is now spelled out, spoken in a crude tone, clearly, simply, so that everybody can hear it.”
Austria, the “nation exporting small arms and energy drinks, accompanied by classical music,” may be a special case. Its people are notoriously submissive and dissatisfied; in Austria, says Köck, more is swept under the proverbial carpet than anywhere else. Be that as it may; he is certainly right when he argues for the broader relevance of his project: “If you want to know what’s possible in Europe, then you ought to have a close look at Austria.”
In Austria, a far-right party and politicians with a program associated with the extreme right have been in government — at federal and at state level — on and off for the past thirty-five years. In Styria, the People’s Party has just agreed to join a Freedom Party-led coalition government. The lessons learned by studying the Austrian case are arguably applicable not just elsewhere in Europe but also in the United States and Australia.
That’s particularly true when it comes to migration and asylum. Migration and asylum policies distinguish the far right by highlighting its narrow-minded nationalism and its disdain for the human dignity of others. Migration and asylum tend to be at the forefront of the agenda set by politicians on the extreme right of the political spectrum (which includes, if considered from afar, not only Donald Trump but also leading representatives of the British Conservatives and Australia’s Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton). They all rely on a politics of fear. Their shrill cries to deter, detain and deport irregularised migrants sound much the same, however much their economic and foreign policies may be at odds with each other.
Köck shows that the success of the herbertkomplex is only possible because moderate political actors have jumped onto the far right’s bandwagon — particularly when it comes to migration and asylum issues. When talking about “illegal migrants,” the conservative People’s Party has long tried to take a page from the Freedom Party’s playbook.
Similar observations could be made about other countries where moderate leaders have made an effort to copy the far right’s rhetoric or preemptively adopt its policies: Joe Biden oversaw a steep climb in deportations, Olaf Scholz would have loved to be able to do the same in Germany, and in Australia the Labor government has just pushed through the most draconian migration legislation since the introduction of mandatory detention (also by Labor) in 1992.
But attempts to appease an electorate that supposedly expects their government to keep irregularised migrants out and abuse those already in the country have not had the desired result. Those voters yearning for racist migration policies tend to opt for the far-right original rather than the moderate copy. “The People’s Party can’t ‘out-hickl’ the Freedom Party, just as the Dollfuß regime couldn’t ‘out-hitler’ the Nazis in the 1930s,” observed veteran Austrian journalist Hans Rauscher last week in the daily Der Standard, making a bold reference to the Austrofascist Engelbert Dollfuß, who led Austria from 1932 to 1934.
Are we witnessing a resurgence of Nazi ideology and politics in Europe? I don’t think so; politicians such as Herbert Kickl in Austria, Björn Höcke in Germany, Jordan Bardella in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands may reject liberal democracy but they are not aiming for a resurrection of the past, such as a return to Nazi-style fascism. Which is not to say that they would be averse to a twenty-first century version of, say, Mussolini’s Italy. That’s probably equally true of the incoming president of the United States.
When reading Köck’s disturbing chronicle, I was nevertheless reminded of accounts of the rise of Hitler. That’s because Kickl — as well as Trump and others — have succeeded in changing public discourse and creating an alternative universe by introducing an alternative vocabulary. They no longer refer to asylum seekers but to “illegals” and depict themselves as defenders of the “people” against an “elite.” “Language is a virus,” Köck writes (switching to English). It infects, and thereby transforms, reality.
Köck, increasingly despondent, despaired at the task he had set himself. “News avoidance,” he notes on 14 December 2023. “I have the feeling that everything has been said already.” While the first thirty days of his chronicle take up seventy-seven pages, he uses only twenty pages to write about the last three months. I can’t imagine him persevering with his diary beyond the entries published in the book.
Viktor Klemperer, a German-Jewish scholar of French literature, kept a diary for more than forty years, including during the twelve years of the “Thousand-Year Reich.” He too despaired. “I don’t enjoy keeping a diary,” he noted on 24 April 1932. “Why waste my time? I won’t read it again, nobody will read it, at some point it will be burnt.”
Yet Klemperer persevered. His journals, published after his death in 1960, are among the most insightful chronicles of daily life in Nazi Germany. In 1947, he published LTI: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Language of the Third Reich is the title of the English edition), in which he drew on his diaries to analyse the Nazis’ use and transformation of language. LTI is a brilliant analysis of the keywords of their rhetoric, and the neologisms and euphemisms they introduced to create an alternative reality.
Thomas Köck doesn’t refer to Klemperer’s diaries or to LTI. On several occasions he mentions a fictional chronicle: Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, first published in 1993 and 1998 respectively.
The diary of Butler’s narrator Lauren Olamina begins on 24 July 2024. By then, climate change has made the United States almost uninhabitable. Clean water and food are in short supply. Most people live in abject poverty. Violent deaths are commonplace, and the rule of law is only a distant memory.
In the second volume of her parable, Butler introduces Texas senator Andrew Steele Jarret, who in 2032 successfully runs for president. Jarret is all in favour of excluding foreigners and non-believers from American society. “They are the natural destroyers of our country. They are lovers of Satan, seducers of our children, rapists of our women, drug sellers, usurers, thieves, and murderers!” he thunders, and then asks: “Shall we let them continue to drag our country down into hell? Think! What do we do to weeds, to viruses, to parasitic worms, to cancers? What must we do to protect our women and children? What can we do to regain our stolen nation?”
Maybe it was Butler who prompted Köck to write (loosely translated):
I would like to write about alle these events as fiction… I don’t want to escape into fiction, but transcend it to comprehend the present. I believe that’s what we need: fiction. The factual doesn’t allow us to get a handle on this unbelievable violence, this unbelievable reality that smothers the world.
As was expected, Herbert Kickl and the Freedom Party won most votes in the Austrian elections. But not everything went to plan. The Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Greens politician who once described himself as a broad-minded left-leaning liberal, took the unusual step of not asking the leader of the party that had won most seats to form a government. Instead, he entrusted that task to the current chancellor and leader of the second-placed People’s Party, Karl Nehammer.
For the past couple of months, Nehammer has been talking to the liberals and the Social Democrats, but the three parties haven’t yet been able to agree on a joint program for a coalition government. That’s also because such a coalition isn’t the first choice of some of Nehammer’s own People’s Party colleagues, whose views align more closely with those promoted by Kickl than with those held by the Social Democrats.
Van der Bellen’s intervention doesn’t mean, however, that the herbertkomplex has been averted. As Köck’s book shows, it became reality well before the election, not least because the People’s Party has long endorsed key demands put forward by Kickl and other politicians of the far right and has freely used the language Kickl and his mentor Haider championed.
In their own ways, Köck, Klemperer and Butler are depicting a future that is well on its way. After reading them, it becomes more difficult to feign surprise about the emergence of something like the herbertkomplex.
But at least we can take comfort from the thought that Butler’s dystopian America, ruled by President Jarret and supported by those “more than a little seduced by [his] talk of making America great again,” is still eight years away. •
Chronik der laufenden Entgleisungen
By Thomas Köck │ Suhrkamp │ €26.00 │ 368 pages
