by Holly A. Case and John Palattella
Sebastian Kurz, Ankara 2015
[John Palattella is editor-at-large at The Nation and contributing editor at The Point.]
On Sunday, October 15, the New York Times ran a story on the Austrian parliamentary elections that were being held that day. "As Austrians head to the polls Sunday," the web teaser said, "Foreign minister Sebastian Kurz's far-right Freedom Party is expected to grab a share of power in the next government."
Later in the day, the heading was corrected: Kurz is not a member of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), but rather the leader of the conservative People's Party (ÖVP). Yet the Times' mistake was a telling one. Even for some in Austria it has been difficult to tell the difference between the positions of the far right and those of Sebastian Kurz.
Kurz is thirty-one years old, hitherto Austria's youngest foreign minister, and the youngest head of one of the two parties in the outgoing governing coalition. On May 14 of this year, in what felt like a well-orchestrated and oddly consensual coup, the ÖVP handed its own head to him on a platter, agreeing to all seven of his conditions for assuming party leadership. The conditions included absolute decision-making power over party matters, as well as the party's unqualified support for a ticket he later ran as part of a movement under his own name in the parliamentary elections. The party agreed to everything, in writing. Comparisons multiplied: Is Kurz the Austrian Macron? Or Victor Orbán (Hungary's right-wing populist prime minister), who was among the first to congratulate him for the coup? Or "Recep Kurz" (a riff on Turkey's neo-authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan)? One thing is certain: after Sunday the election, in which the ÖVP came in first with 31.6 percent of the vote, an increase of 7.6 percent from the party's performance in 2013, Kurz will almost certainly be Austria's new chancellor—the youngest the country has known—and calling the shots for the next five years.
Politics does not have many child prodigies, and foreign policy in particular has long been the domain of old hands. But for over a year now there has been a swelling fascination with Kurz, who, in addition to serving as Austrian foreign and integration minister, is also now chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Ask around Austria and everyone seems to have a favorite Kurz anecdote. There's the one about how, during a municipal election campaign in Vienna, he drove a "cool-o-mobile" as party girls threw black condoms to the people; or the time he took an economy seat on a commercial flight and received an enthusiastic ovation from fellow passengers; or how he used to stroll through the outdoor Hannover Market, in the middle of one of Vienna's most diverse neighborhoods, and address the Turkish vendors by name. Members of his party have long spoken of him like a horse they're waiting to trot out for the big race. In December, when Kurz entered a room to take a seat beside the Czech foreign minister at an event on regional cooperation, an economist leaned over to whisper to his neighbor: "Behold, Austria's next chancellor!"
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