Austria's nationalist Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache said after Sunday's national election that while his political force didn't win, he felt "somewhat vindicated" by the high level of support for his party's platform, which had been "copied" by the winner — the center-right People's Party, led by Sebastian Kurz. Actually, the cross-pollination went both ways. The emergence of a more coherent center-right version of immigrant integration policy in the EU may be one positive consequence. On the other hand, the alliance could bring a deepening of the bloc's east-west divide.
The conventional wisdom is that 31-year-old Kurz, the first millennial to run a European country, led the conservative People's Party to victory by stealing Strache's thunder on immigration. The Freedom Party confidently led in the polls after the 2015 refugee crisis, and then came Kurz and turned his establishment party into the safe alternative for the many voters who wanted tight immigration controls but not Strache's nasty baggage. The Freedom Party leader, after all, has a history with neo-Nazi groups in Austria and Germany that scares off many moderate voters. Kurz himself, however, is more willing to govern with the Freedom Party as a junior coalition partner than with the center-left Social Democrats who, after the postal ballots are counted, are likely to find themselves slightly ahead of Freedom in the election. And there are solid reasons for that.
Unlike Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, who was politically weakened by her decision to let more than a million asylum seekers into Germany in 2015, Kurz was in a strong position to make a case for a new approach to immigration. This is an area in which he has specialized for most of his admittedly brief political career. Kurz's first position in the Austrian federal government, in 2011, was state secretary for integration, and the integration portfolio has been part of the foreign ministry — run by Kurz — since 2014.