Austria Elections Reflect Europe’s Right-wing Surge

Austria’s elections on Sunday could see Norbert Hofer chosen as the country’s first far-right leader since World War II. Austrians will head to the polls following a victory this week by Francois Fillon, the more right-leaning of two candidates in France’s conservative primary.

Analysts say voters in both countries are being heavily influenced by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States.

Fillon, a former prime minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, was the more conservative of two top candidates running for president in France’s Republican Party primary elections Sunday. He has been compared to the late British conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his calls to slash government spending, cut taxes for the wealthy, boost defense and get rid of France’s 35-hour work week.

Analysts say his victory points to a clear swing to the right among French voters, a trend that was already visible in the rise of Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-immigrant National Front, whose popularity ratings soared after a series of terrorist attacks shook France last summer.

Fillon’s victory heading into the French general elections next year is also a further sign that anti-establishment sentiments are brewing in France much in the same way as they have been in the United States and elsewhere in Europe.

Many voters consider Fillon, a lawyer-turned-politician, an outsider like Trump and think he could bring a set of fresh ideas in the wake of an administration led by Socialist President Francois Hollande, whom newspapers have depicted in cartoons and commentaries as comatose. Hollande’s approval ratings slipped to 4 percent in November.

This Sunday’s presidential elections in Austria could reflect a similar trend and serve as a test for the strength of populist movements in Europe.

The Austrian poll is a rerun of elections held in May, when results showed the Freedom Party’s Hofer, a former aeronautical engineer, lost by 31,000 votes to Alexander Van der Bellen, a Green Party member who ran as an independent. Austria’s constitutional court overturned the results after an investigation found irregularities in the counting of mailed-in ballots.

Analysts attribute the rise of populist, right-wing movements in Europe to anger over a system that voters see as corrupt and rigged against the common person.

“You find that governments and lawmakers are losing the trust of their citizens,” said Maggie Murphy, senior global advocacy manager at Transparency International. The group recently released a study that found one in three citizens polled in Europe and Central Asia considered corruption a big problem in their countries. That was the case not only in former Eastern Bloc countries and Central Asia, but in highly developed Western European democracies like Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.