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A CORPSE IN THE DANUBE AND A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE may sound extra like components from a movie noir than an evidence of what’s occurring in Europe in the present day. However to grasp the tortured state of the Continent’s politics, there’s no higher place to begin.
In October, the physique of Christian Pilnacek, as soon as essentially the most highly effective man within the Austrian justice ministry, was discovered floating within the river not removed from the city of Krems, lifeless of an obvious suicide a couple of hours after he’d been arrested on a DUI after driving within the mistaken course on the freeway.
“His life was taken from him,” the civil servant’s widow, a prime prosecutor, informed a memorial service in November, in a bitter swipe on the nation’s political elites.
Pilnacek, a dapper civil servant who counted as one among his nation’s finest authorized minds, had spent the previous years battling a collection of allegations that he had leaked privileged info to his political cronies and the press and had tried to quash a sweeping corruption investigation surrounding Vienna’s buy of fighter jets.
Within the wake of his loss of life, nonetheless, it appeared that it wasn’t a responsible conscience that pushed him over the brink, however a refusal to bend his rules to the need of the Austrian Folks’s Celebration (ÖVP), a bulwark of the nation’s political system that has been a part of the federal authorities with out interruption since 1987.
A month after his physique was discovered, a surreptitious recording of Pilnacek emerged, wherein he may very well be heard describing how senior politicians within the ÖVP, the occasion of former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, had pressured him to kill investigations into political corruption.
“ÖVP ministers got here to me even after there had been a search of the occasion headquarters and requested why I received’t shut it down,” Pilnacek, a gregarious man who loved gossip, may be heard saying on the recording. “I all the time informed them: I can’t do it, I received’t do it, I don’t need to do it.”
Going through his personal authorized troubles and feeling unjustly accused, he had turned to those self same politicians for assist — solely to have been refused as a result of the distraught civil servant hadn’t been efficient in halting the opposite investigations.
“After I requested if they might do one thing to help me, the response was: ‘You had been by no means actually with us,’” Pilnacek says on the tape, which was recorded with out his data at a Vienna restaurant a couple of months earlier than his loss of life.
Even for a society steeled by a long time of political scandal and corruption, the episode was jaw-dropping, prompting loud requires a reckoning.
It’ll have to attend. For a lot of Austrian voters, the largest shocker surrounding the affair was the ÖVP’s response to the revelations. As a substitute of dissolving the federal government and triggering a brand new election, leaders of the center-right occasion went on the assault, accusing their political enemies of intrigue and utilizing “KGB strategies” to undermine the occasion.
“It’s not acceptable for our nation to show right into a state of snitches,” ÖVP Basic Secretary Christian Stocker warned.
It was, in impact, a concession to his opponents, particularly on the far proper. In making an attempt to steer Austrians down a conspiracy rabbit gap as a substitute of coming clear, Stocker was resorting to the very populist techniques his occasion had for years insisted had been beneath it.
Far proper rising
AS EUROPE FACES ITS MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION YEAR in residing reminiscence, the Continent is in for an additional spherical of soul-searching in regards to the causes behind the rise of the far proper and different anti-establishment forces.
There are, in fact, a wide range of elements. Relying on the occasion and the nation, they vary from a pointy rise in migration to resentment over how institution events managed the pandemic to the European Union’s help for Ukraine and considerations over the struggle in Gaza.
However there’s one other potent driver that’s far much less usually mentioned: a wave of corruption scandals that has washed over Europe’s political institution lately, offering ample grist for far-right events that solid “the system” as hopelessly crooked and engineered to hurt “regular” individuals.
Whereas most far-right events have their very own points with corruption and graft, voters are typically extra forgiving of their crimes, actually because they take into account the whole political class to be untrustworthy and are drawn to the events’ usually radical (if unrealistic) prescriptions for fixing political issues.
Austria — dwelling to the Freedom Celebration (FPÖ), a bunch based within the Fifties by a former SS basic — is poised to see essentially the most dramatic rightward shift. The Pilnacek affair marks simply the most recent in a string of scandals which have uncovered systemic corruption within the governing ÖVP, buoying the FPÖ, which has loved a cushty lead within the polls for greater than a 12 months.
With the European Parliament election in June and a nationwide ballot anticipated within the fall, the far-right occasion’s rise may have a considerable affect on the Continent’s politics. Austria, by advantage of its historical past and place on the crossroads of Europe, has usually served as a proving floor for political actions. It was right here, for instance, that each the political antisemitism that impressed Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl’s Zionist motion had been born.
Extra just lately, it has served as a laboratory for the anti-immigrant far proper, which below the FPÖ is poised to document one among its biggest victories but.
Celebration chief Herbert Kickl — a hard-right ideologue who has vowed to halt each Ukraine’s EU accession and the sanctions the bloc has imposed on Russia — might quickly be sitting within the Council alongside the EU’s bête noire, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whom Kickl has described as a task mannequin.
At a packed rally close to the southern Austrian metropolis of Graz final weekend, Kickl referred to as for an “EU of the fatherlands,” pledging to “defend Austria’s pursuits” alongside allies just like the Hungarian chief.
“The technical time period on the European degree is ‘veto,’” Kickl informed the enthusiastic crowd, which sat at lengthy beer corridor tables sipping mugs of lager. Kickl took the stage amid a flurry of fireworks because the theme music from the movie “Hercules” performed within the background. All through his hourlong deal with, viewers members, many sporting lederhosen and different conventional Alpine garb, interrupted his remarks with loud chants of “Herbert, Herbert!”
“They will’t cease us,” Kickl stated at one level throughout the present, dismissing Karl Nehammer, the present ÖVP chancellor, as a “lifeless man strolling.”
Nehammer’s ÖVP is presently polling in third place behind the FPÖ and the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and his private rankings are the bottom ever recorded for a chancellor, with greater than 60 p.c of respondents in a latest ballot saying they’d no confidence in him.
To be truthful, he’s the second man to inherit the job after Kurz’s 2021 resignation and had solely restricted political expertise. Latest campaigns by his picture makers to spice up his standing, resembling one on the virtues of consuming schnitzel, have fallen flat. His repute was additional undermined in September following the discharge of a video of a small occasion gathering in Salzburg, the place he prompt poor individuals go to McDonald’s if they need a scorching meal for his or her kids.
Kickl’s momentum has created an even bigger fear for Europe: A giant win by the FPÖ may gasoline help for its German sister occasion, the Different for Germany (AfD), which is already in second place, polling at greater than 20 p.c.
Corruptus delicti
CORRUPTION AND POLITICS HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED hand-in-glove, however the matter has gained new-found relevance as scandals have rocked lots of Europe’s once-dominant centrist events from France to Italy to Greece, pushing some to the brink of extinction.
After years of corruption investigations and prosecutions involving former President Nicolas Sarkozy and different main figures, for instance, France’s once-dominant heart proper completed with lower than 5 p.c of the vote within the first spherical of presidential elections in 2022.
In Spain, the center-right Common Celebration (PP) continues to be affected by a sweeping corruption case that led to the conviction of 29 individuals, together with senior occasion officers, in 2018.
The issue is even worse in Central Europe, the place a tradition of corruption amongst the political mainstream in nations such because the Czech Republic has fueled the rise of populists resembling Andrej Babiš, who received energy on a promise to scrub up the system in 2017 solely to face an investigation into fraud allegations himself.
And in Brussels, the Qatargate cash-for-influence case has rocked the European Parliament with the largest corruption scandal to hit the European establishments for many years.
In distinction to far-right events, which frequently bounce again from scandal below new management on the facility of their radical rhetoric, mainstream events have a harder time — largely as a result of it’s usually not clear what they stand for. After World Battle II, Europe’s center-right and center-left blocs served distinct clienteles: the skilled and dealing lessons, often with sturdy ties to different curiosity teams resembling farmers and church buildings.
As of late, nonetheless, the variations between the blocs are sometimes troublesome to discern. With voter choice usually influenced extra by persona than substance, allegiance to the events has frayed.
On the subject of corruption, Austria — a rustic of almost 9 million individuals located within the heart of the Continent — stands aside: Its scandals are actually the stuff of Netflix collection.
The nation’s center-right and center-left events (ÖVP and SPÖ) have dominated the nation’s politics since WWII. That success created a system of clientelism and patronage, nonetheless, that’s within the strategy of disintegrating following a collection of investigations and court docket trials.
Within the Seventies, the Lucona affair concerned a scheme hatched by a politically related coffee-house proprietor named Udo Proksch. His plan concerned blowing up a tanker he’d bought to gather the insurance coverage. Six individuals had been killed within the explosion close to the Maldives in 1977 sinking the tanker. Subsequent investigations into Proksch’s political hyperlinks led to the resignation of 16 officers, together with the president of the Austrian parliament, which below the structure counts because the second-highest workplace, and the inside minister. The episode was later made right into a film.
The so-called Noricum Affair within the Eighties concerned the unlawful sale of lots of of howitzers by an Austrian arms maker to each Iran and Iraq, which had been engaged in a struggle towards each other on the time. It, too, uncovered shut hyperlinks between the politicians and illicit enterprise pursuits. Cleansing up was extra simple as a result of the identical politicians on the heart of the affair had already been implicated within the Lucona scandal.
Extra just lately, investigators explored allegations that Eurofighter lobbyists paid about €100 million to Austrian politicians in trade for the nation’s €2 billion order of fighter jets in 2003. In 2019, Pilnacek informed colleagues in a gathering that he would “flip a blind eye” in the event that they quietly shut down the investigation, arguing that it wasn’t winnable. That sparked a probe towards him for alleged abuse of his workplace, which was later shelved.
After a greater than decade-long investigation, prosecutors filed costs in June towards two executives concerned within the Eurofighter deal, alleging cash laundering. The probabilities for convictions are murky, nonetheless. Regardless of ample proof that the lobbyists paid out bribes, the one convictions within the case thus far have been throughout the border in Germany.
Turnaround
IT’S IRONIC, GIVEN KICKL’S FOCUS ON STATE CORRUPTION, that the Austrian scandal to beat all scandals (which impressed each a miniseries and a separate documentary) concerned not one of many centrist institution events however the FPÖ itself.
Named after the Spanish island of Ibiza, it was the results of a 2017 sting by a personal investigator and his feminine companion, who was posing because the niece of a Russian oligarch.
Collectively, they lured Heinz-Christian Strache, then the FPÖ chief, and an affiliate of his to a villa on the island. That they had outfitted the home with hidden cameras. Over the course of an extended night fueled by an infinite provide of cigarettes and vodka blended with Pink Bull, Strache — who on the time was not in authorities — supplied to commerce affect for monetary help.
By the point the video of the encounter was leaked in mid-2019, Strache was vice chancellor in a authorities led by the ÖVP’s Kurz.
The affair triggered an unprecedented political disaster, prompting a authorities collapse and new elections that left the FPÖ weakened and in opposition.
Looking back, it was a fortunate flip of occasions for the occasion. Whereas Kurz’s ÖVP did properly within the election because the FPÖ sank, the flurry of investigations surrounding Ibiza ended up ensnaring the middle proper as properly.
A cache of showing textual content messages found on a Kurz aide’s cellphone uncovered the chancellor’s sonny-boy persona to be fiction; as a substitute of the modernizer the chancellor claimed to be, Kurz was revealed as an old-school machine politician keen to do no matter it took to make sure his maintain on energy.
Going through prison investigations for allegedly making false statements to parliament and utilizing state funds to pay for manipulated polls, Kurz was pressured to resign in October 2021 and is presently standing trial.
Kickl, in the meantime, took over the FPÖ and has used its time in opposition to reposition the occasion each as a scourge of the corruption it as soon as embodied and as a paragon of far-right ideology: anti-immigrant, anti-establishment, anti-EU and anti-support for Ukraine in its struggle towards Russia.
The turnaround of his occasion signifies that voters could also be keen to look previous earlier corruption if a celebration has a compelling message and a frontrunner who embodies it. Although Kickl’s approval rankings aren’t excessive, individuals take him significantly. In distinction to Strache, a educated dental technician who cultivated a playboy picture, Kickl is an austere presence with a ardour for triathlons and different excessive sports activities who eats unsweetened oatmeal with bitter milk for breakfast.
After finding out philosophy and political science (and finishing levels in neither), Kickl grew to become energetic within the Freedom Celebration within the Nineteen Nineties as an aide to Jörg Haider, the occasion’s then-leader who pioneered lots of the far-right methods, together with the concentrate on migration, which have made the events a power to be reckoned with throughout Europe. A charismatic icon to many in Austria, Haider, who died in a automotive crash in 2008, led the Freedom Celebration into authorities in 2000 because the junior companion to the ÖVP, sparking outrage throughout Europe and a diplomatic boycott by Austria’s EU companions.
For many of his political profession, Kickl labored behind the scenes as an adviser and speechwriter. He’s credited with coining lots of the occasion’s most memorable — and controversial — slogans, resembling “Pummerin, not muezin.” Pummerin is the nickname of the large bell atop St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. It was initially solid from Turkish cannons captured throughout an Ottoman siege of the town within the seventeenth century. A few of Kickl’s different traces have been not simply offensive, however outright racist. In a 2001 speech he wrote for Haider, he penned the road: “I don’t understand how somebody named Ariel may be so soiled,” an antisemitic reference to Ariel Muzikant, the then chief of Austria’s Jewish group. “Ariel” can be a model of detergent.
Regardless of widespread condemnation of Kickl’s rhetoric (throughout a brief stint as inside minister in 2018, he referred to as for “concentrating asylum seekers in a single place” and altered the title of an asylum registration facility to “deportation heart“) his standing inside the occasion solely improved. In an effort to enchantment to a wider viewers, he has additionally softened a few of his racist overtones — a bit. He just lately started campaigning below the banner “Volkskanzler,” or individuals’s chancellor. Whereas it might sound innocuous, it was additionally a moniker utilized by Hitler.
“He’s on the street to success,” stated Anton Pelinka, the doyen of Austrian political science. “The content material of what he says is as excessive as ever however the way in which wherein he presents it’s extra reasonable.”
That gentler method has helped the FPÖ almost double its help because the final election in 2019. The occasion has additionally scored sturdy features in a string of regional elections, becoming a member of state authorities alongside the ÖVP because the junior companion, a course of that has helped additional normalize its excessive political agenda.
In distinction, the ÖVP is on the defensive. The occasion’s help has fallen to about 20 p.c, from a post-Ibiza excessive of greater than 37 p.c and its lack of regional help has pressured it into coalition with the FPÖ.
Pilnacek affair
THE DRAMA SURROUNDING KURZ HASN’T HELPED. Now a enterprise guide, the ex-chancellor just lately suffered one other blow after his affiliation with René Benko, a high-flying Austrian actual property tycoon, was uncovered.
Benko, whose empire was pressured out of business in latest weeks within the largest insolvency in Austrian historical past, employed Kurz to lure buyers from the Center East, agreeing to pay the previous politician thousands and thousands in return.
And there’s Kurz’s function within the Pilnacek affair. On the morning the physique of the previous official was found, Kurz interrupted his testimony in court docket to precise his shock, saying he had spoken to him the evening earlier than about his case. “I noticed how he was handled lately, and I noticed what it did to him,” he informed journalists later that day.
Kurz wasn’t referring to his personal occasion’s therapy of Pilnacek, nonetheless, however the corruption prosecutor’s pursuit of him. Unwittingly, the chancellor triggered the discharge of the damning audio of Pilnacek within the restaurant.
The recording was made by Christian Mattura, a former politician, who was having dinner with Pilnacek and determined to secretly tape the dialog when the topic turned to the ÖVP. He claimed later he had no intention of releasing the audio till he heard Kurz’s feedback, which he seen as hypocrisy and as a crass try to make use of Pilnacek’s tragic finish to assault prosecutors.
Kurz declined to remark for this text.
Extra damaging to the ÖVP, nonetheless, is the function of its parliamentary president, Wolfgang Sobotka. Within the recording, Pilnacek fingered Sobotka, a former inside minister and longtime ÖVP powerbroker, for pressuring him to finish a variety of investigations into the occasion.
“In each dialog, Sobotka would say, ‘you failed, you didn’t shut down’” the investigations, Pilnacek stated on the key recording. “However it wasn’t doable, and I wouldn’t do it. We reside in a rustic of legal guidelines.”
Sobotka denied the allegations, saying that he by no means mentioned ongoing investigations with Pilnacek, a reality he stated the official had himself confirmed in testimony to parliament. Sobotka stated he would proceed to hold out his workplace “in accordance with the regulation.”
Kickl has wasted few alternatives to capitalize on the scandal, calling for Sobotka’s speedy resignation, telling him straight in parliament: “You aren’t our president.”
“I’m tempted to say that compared to you, Strache was a person of honor,” Kickl stated throughout a debate, referring to his predecessor’s fast resignation after the Ibiza video grew to become public. “No less than he knew what to do when he was confronted with the accusations.”
Sobotka seems intent on ready for issues to blow over, a tactic that has labored earlier than. In 2020, it emerged that Novomatic, an Austrian on line casino group on the heart of the Ibiza investigations, had donated €8,000 to a chamber orchestra in Sobotka’s hometown, Waidhofen an der Ybbs. The orchestra’s director? Wolfgang Sobotka. He disputes any connection to the donation.
The politician’s affinity for classical music additionally impressed him to lease a gold-plated Bösendorfer grand piano for the parliament to the tune of €3,000 a month. His workplace defended the transfer, arguing that “artwork and tradition are a prime precedence in Austria.” The general public wasn’t shopping for it although, and Sobotka finally bowed to strain to trade the piano for the standard black mannequin.
Fixing the reputational harm has been tougher. About 80 p.c of voters don’t have any confidence in him, based on a latest ballot, rating Sobotka final amongst all Austrian politicians. Sobotka didn’t reply to remark for this text.
Up to now, Sobotka has refused to resign, handing a present that retains on giving to Kickl, for whom Sobotka serves as Exhibit A in his recitation of all that’s mistaken with the opposite political events. Kickl understands that — given his lead within the polls — he solely wants to attend. “The insanity will finish quickly,” he promised his occasion trustworthy in Graz. “Salvation is at hand.”