Freedom Party leader 'HC' Strache has lost the mantle of change — but he's likely to win a seat in government.
Nobody ever told Heinz-Christian Strache you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But if the polls ahead of Sunday's election are anything to go by, he'll soon find out if that's true.
The Austrian right-winger, famous for breathless beer-fest attacks on his country's political mainstream, has been trying for months to convince his compatriots that he has more in his political playbook than the cheap shot.
"We are the only credible force for change," Strache said of his Freedom Party (FPÖ) during his final debate with Social Democratic Chancellor Christian Kern before Austrians go to the polls.
But his hopes of becoming Austria's first far-right chancellor appear to have been dashed by the country's wunderkind foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, whose center-right People's Party (ÖVP) enjoys a comfortable lead heading into Sunday's election.
Kurz, who at 31 years old is the country's most popular politician, managed to steal much of the Freedom Party's thunder by coopting Strache's calls for stronger control of refugees and effortlessly pilfering the mantle of change.
Though many Austrians are still drawn by the Freedom Party's nativist rhetoric, they don't appear to trust Strache, who ranks among the country's least popular politicians, to run the country.
The FPÖ, which for years led many national polls — as recently as 2013 — has seen its fortunes fade as election day approaches.
Strache has tried to make an issue of Kurz's youth by referring to his rival as "a nice young man." But his efforts to call Kurz out for adopting Freedom Party positions have generally fallen flat.
Strache's plight is a common one among Europe's practitioners of far-right politics. The no-holds-barred style and red meat rhetoric that gets them noticed and drives their popularity is also what disqualifies them in many voters' eyes for higher office.
Similar to Strache, France's Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders of the Netherlands have struggled to maintain their support through the peaks and valleys of an election campaign. One common problem is overexposure.
That doesn't mean the Freedom Party won't do well on Sunday. Strache will in all likelihood take his party into government for the first time since 2003. Kurz's ÖVP, currently the junior partner in a grand coalition with Social Democrats, has made it clear it's ready for change and open to a coalition with the FPÖ.
The grand coalition has been plagued by infighting for years, sapping its public support. Kurz, riding high due to his hard stance during the refugee crisis, decided to trigger new elections in May. Since then, relations between the two governing parties have deteriorated into all-out war, culminating in a spate of dirty campaign tactics by Kurz and the Social Democrats.
Strache has used outrage over the tactics, which raised questions about the ethics of both mainstream parties, to drive home his mantra about what he considers endemic corruption among Austria's political establishment. But while the FPÖ will likely get a boost from the affair, it's unlikely to be enough to vault the party back into first.
Strache's fate will largely depend on how the party performs on Sunday.
Though virtually unknown in Europe, the far-right leader has been a fixture in Austria for more than a decade.
After Jörg Haider, the charismatic populist who pioneered the slick anti-immigrant campaign tactics now common across Europe, split with the FPÖ in 2005, Strache was left to pick up the pieces. Haider formed a new party and took a number of key party figures with him. Support for the FPÖ collapsed.
A dental technician by trade, Strache has been involved in politics since the early 1990s but has never actually governed. Though he succeeded in rebuilding the FPÖ, he has never managed to shake his reputation as a clone of Haider, who died in a car accident in 2008. And while Strache, who hails from Vienna, adopted Haider's style and strategy, he struggled to match the populist's natural charm.
During last year's contentious presidential election in Austria, Norbert Hofer, another Freedom Party politician, rose to national prominence. Though Hofer lost the close race, he built a broad following beyond the FPÖ's core clientele, and many political observers see him as Strache's natural successor.
Strache is likely to stick around, but it's not yet clear in what capacity. If the party finishes a strong second, Strache would have a powerful hand in coalition talks with Kurz's ÖVP. Even so, few in Vienna see him as the country's next foreign minister, the natural position of the leader of the junior coalition partner.
Unlike in 2000, when the FPÖ inclusion in the government sparked international outrage, the reaction this time is likely to be somewhat more muted. That's partly because the West has become inured to far-right successes. But it's also because Strache remains a fairly obscure figure outside of Austria.
Haider, a longtime regional premier, agreed to stay out of government in 2000 in order to not further inflame Austria's international isolation after the election. Strache, who has criticized the concessions the party's leadership made at the time, is unlikely to follow that example.
A prominent government role for Strache would make many Austrians uneasy.
As with Haider, who often used anti-Semitic and racist innuendo, Strache's favorite political tool is the dog whistle.
During a television debate with Kurz this week, Strache raised questions about the motivations of one of the foreign minister's campaign donors, Jewish real-estate investor Georg Muzicant. The campaign support was evidence of murky "entanglements," Strache said, using a familiar right-wing code to suggest a Jewish conspiracy. Ariel Muzicant, Georg's father and the former head of Vienna's Jewish community, was a frequent target of Haider's.
Kurz called Strache's comments "dishonorable." Still, the FPÖ leader's thinly veiled anti-Semitism is unlikely to stop Kurz from building a coalition with him.
The acceptance of such taboos by Austria's political mainstream worries those who have fought the Freedom Party for years. Doron Rabinovici, a prominent Austrian author, has warned that the leadership of Strache's FPÖ, which includes members of German nationalist brotherhoods, poses an even greater threat to the country's democracy than Haider did.
An earlier version of this story misstated Kurz's age.