Herbert Kickl

The “People’s Chancellor” dream burst at the last meter

Kickl, who attaches no importance to glamor or the love of society, has not pushed forward personally for a long time.

(Bild: ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Herbert Kickl fell just a few meters short of becoming chancellor. Neither the first place in the National Council elections nor the 180-degree turnaround of the ÖVP, which ultimately entered into government negotiations with the FPÖ, could make the blue dream of the "People's Chancellor" come true.

The long ostracized Kickl was only able to put aside his aggressive rhetoric in the negotiations to a limited extent, played his cards (too) high and frightened the ÖVP with his claim to power. However, the end of the coalition negotiations with the People's Party will hardly mean the end of Kickl's career at the head of the Freedom Party. On the contrary, it is to be expected that the Carinthian, who has made his home in the municipality surrounding Vienna, will see the end of the negotiations as a new incentive to win another record number of votes in the event of a new election.

Kickl, who was long regarded as a second-tier figure in the party before coming to power, managed his rise with a firm course to the right. He recognized early on that it is currently possible to go very far politically without losing voter support. While his predecessors at the top of the FPÖ tried to move towards the political center, Kickl pushed the Freedom Party further and further to the right. He benefited from a coronavirus policy that was moderately well-founded from a scientific point of view, and the lack of substantive concepts for a long time did him no harm at all. In addition, he skillfully expanded the Freedom Party's range of topics to include far-right issues such as criticism of climate protection, railed against "wokeness" and "gender madness" and also took a significantly different course than the other parties when it came to Russia and Ukraine.

Kickl sealed off the FPÖ to the right
Kickl, who is not necessarily a charming popular figure himself, was able to seal off the right fringe for the FPÖ. While a tussle between different parties began on the left of the center and the ÖVP was faced with an annoying opponent in the NEOS, the FPÖ leader incorporated everything on the far right into the Freedom Party. The pandemic also enabled the blue party to fish in the pond of opponents of the measures. The fact that he shared some seemingly crude theses and also benevolently allowed those FPÖ MPs to brand institutions such as the WHO as the possible "executive body of a new world government" did nothing to dampen his rise. On the contrary: initially successful lists critical of measures such as the MFG withered away to insignificance in the face of Kickl's positioning.

Among many observers, Kickl was and is considered a great strategist - at least until the current coalition negotiations came to an end. The former gag writer for Jörg Haider also served for many years as Secretary General under former FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache and is highly regarded within the party as a brilliant campaign manager who always used provocation. Kickl, who attaches no importance to glamor or the love of society, did not push forward personally for a long time.

Herbert Kickl

• Born on October 19, 1968
• married, one son
• 2002-2006: Managing Director of the Freedom Party Academy
• 2005-2017: Secretary General of the FPÖ
• 2017-2019: Minister of the Interior
• Since 2019: Club Chairman of the FPÖ

Dismissal as Interior Minister
Under the turquoise-blue government under Sebastian Kurz, he would have been content with the club chairman's chair, according to party colleagues. However, he was appointed to the Ministry of the Interior, where Kickl shone more with anti-asylum symbolism than actual successes in a liberal sense. He was already too unpredictable for the ÖVP at the time, which is why they wanted to get rid of him immediately in the wake of the Ibiza affair and had him thrown out of the government.

This is likely to have triggered an unprecedented ambition in Kickl. He more than rudely pushed the politically rather gentle Norbert Hofer from the party leadership and positioned the FPÖ somewhat brutally to the right. In addition to the well-known anti-foreigner policy and the fight against "wokeness", resistance to corona measures in particular served as a blue turbo. Hardly anyone saw the irony in the fact that Kickl himself was the first to call for a lockdown. The fact that he advertised a dewormer as an alternative treatment to vaccination clearly did not bother the electorate either.

(Bild: APA/ROLAND SCHLAGER)

Controversial Ukraine policy
From coronavirus, the debate moved straight on to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, where the FPÖ vehemently rejected military support for Kiev. The Freedom Party stayed away from a video broadcast of the Ukrainian president's parliamentary speech, but this did not prevent them from indignantly rejecting the accusation of being Russia-friendly. The final boost in voters' favor was provided by inflation. The icing on the cake, so to speak, was the FPÖ's criticism of - according to blue diction - "climate communism", "wokeness" and "gender madness". All political opponents were no longer called by their party name, but were instead denigrated as a "united party".

But Kickl is strategist enough to know that the ÖVP also needs to be enticed. While the married father of a son who grew up in a working-class family had previously been seen more as a social politician, during the election campaign he presented an economic program that made industrialists click their tongues. Strategically, this was probably his smartest move. With the carrot of tax cuts in front of them, the ÖVP's economic wing was even less willing to enter into a difficult duet with the SPÖ and quickly made the entire People's Party forget the commitments it had made up to that point that it would never form a coalition with an FPÖ under Kickl. The funny thing is that the day before the negotiations ended, WKÖ President Harald Mahrer of all people was the first to confirm that the FPÖ was not "fit for government".

Strong position for Kickl
Kickl's unwillingness to compromise in the negotiations is not only due to his first place in the National Council elections, in which the FPÖ came just ahead of the ÖVP with 28.85% and 26.27%. Rather, the current polls are likely to have further boosted the self-confidence of the blue party: Most recently, these were at values between 32 and 37 percent. If this remains the case, new elections would probably not benefit anyone as much as the Freedom Party.

In his private life, Kickl, who suffers more from the crowds than he loves them, lives a very secluded life. His passion is the mountains, where he likes to share his summit victories with his followers via social media. This is also linked to the only domestic problem he reported in an interview before the election. His wife takes little pleasure in him trudging around their home in Lower Austria in dirty hiking boots.