“Ibizagate” should have come as no surprise to Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s chancellor
morning in Vienna in December 2017, Charlemagne heard a tempting case for what might be called “the hug strategy”. He was drinking coffee with an ally of Sebastian Kurz, the young leader of the centre-right Austrian People’s Party who was hours from a coalition deal with the hard-right Austrian Freedom Party . “He has grown up,” said the Kurz-ite of Heinz-Christian Strache, theleader, adding that, in any case, Mr Kurz would be able to manage his new ally.
It proved otherwise. Mr Kurz’s big hug failed to stifle Mr Strache. At recent rallies in the South Tyrol and Linz your columnist watched the vulpine vice-chancellor charge in to the boisterous oomph of Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March before unveiling his latest designs: Austrian passports for German-speakers in northern Italy, mosque closures, an end to the “population replacement” of white Europeans by immigrants. Support for theremained high and stable at around 25%.
The sorry tale is part of a bigger saga. All over Europe populist nationalists like Mr Strache are challenging moderate politicians, many of whom are adopting a version of the hug strategy by emulating some of the populists’ language and policies, or bringing them into government, or both as in Austria. In Bavaria’s state election campaign last autumn the conservative Christian Social Union tilted right on migration and picked fights with Angela Merkel’s moderate Christian Democrat Union.
Elsewhere the cost has, as in Mr Kurz’s case, been less electoral than reputational and ideological. Britain’s Conservatives vanquished the anti-United Kingdom Independence Party by appropriating its main policy but are now tearing themselves apart. In Denmark the centre-right Venstre’s rightward shift and informal collaboration with the hard-right Danish People’s Party has pushed the country’s entire political contest in that direction.
But if this is not enough, Europe’s moderates may be about to get another big dose of evidence. The European Parliament elections will probably see the centre-right bloc, many of whose member parties have pursued some version of the hug strategy, lose more seats than any other group. The right-wingers, some of them emboldened by roles in coalitions at national and regional levels, are expected be among the main winners. If so, it will be yet more proof that the hugs don’t work.
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