Vexed in Vienna

WHAT is Austria’s problem? In Vienna the streets are clean, the trams rattle reliably past and the bow-tied waiters still dispense their Sachertorte with supercilious smirks. The country is well-run, prosperous and secure. There are no neglected banlieues. Even the refugees who poured through last year have stopped coming. And yet Austria is on the verge of electing a far-right president from a party with an unsavoury past.

Last month, for the first time in post-war Austria, voters in the first round of a presidential election spurned the candidates backed by the centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) and centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP), which run the country in a “grand coalition”. In Sunday’s run-off they must choose between Norbert Hofer, the fresh-faced candidate of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), or Alexander Van der Bellen, an aged professor backed by the Greens. Mr Hofer is the favourite, and the rest of Europe is alarmed.

The FPÖ operates from a familiar populist-right playbook. The suits have grown sharper while the outright racism has been cloaked. The hostility has shifted from Jews to Muslims, a strategy that resonates with voters of Serbian background, whom the party has assiduously cultivated. Its leaders prefer social media to the traditional kind. Its base is poorly educated rural men. It has no good words for America but plenty for Vladimir Putin.

If he wins, Mr Hofer is unlikely to wreak constitutional havoc. But should Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ’s chairman, become chancellor at the next federal election (due in September 2018, if not sooner), some fear a Hungarian-style attack on independent institutions. Others worry about squabbles with neighbours; Mr Strache has mused that the German-speakers of South Tyrol, across the Italian border, might like to rejoin their Austrian brethren. What do voters see in this outfit?

For decades Austria was a living example of the old saw that there is no point in voting because the government always gets in. The Second Republic, established after the war, has been run almost without interruption by either, or (usually) both, the SPÖ and the ÖVP. Under Austria’s Proporz system, jobs, housing and business licences were doled out on the basis of party membership. Laws are written by party-affiliated labour or business groups and handed to parliament to rubber-stamp. Even now two motoring associations and two mountain-trekking clubs exist, to ensure that Austrians need never dally with another political tribe when their cars break down or when on an Alpine stroll.

This arrangement worked when growth was high and jobs plentiful. But when the system faltered, cronyism made an easy target for genuine opposition parties. Austria, which never went through a thorough German-style post-Nazi reckoning, was not inoculated against a xenophobic party like the FPÖ. The party chugged along for years as a political also-ran, until hostility to the clubbiness of Austrian politics lifted it into the major league.

The FPÖ became a serious force in the late 1980s under a charismatic leader, Jörg Haider, who was not averse to praising Nazi Germany. In 1999 it won 27% of the vote and joined an ÖVP-led coalition. (Austria’s horrified EU partners briefly cut diplomatic links.) But after a flurry of early reforms the government turned out to be no less wedded to the methods of patronage than its predecessors. The extent of the corruption the FPÖ practised while in office is only now emerging.

The party split, and for a while sank. Mr Haider died in a car crash in 2008. But last year’s refugee crisis revived it. Austria’s hapless social-democrat chancellor, Werner Faymann, initially supported Germany’s open-door policy before pirouetting gracelessly towards border closures and asylum quotas, as the FPÖ had advocated from the start. The grand coalition fed the discontent with aimless rows. The FPÖ has now topped polls for over a year. On May 9th, under pressure from his disgruntled party, Mr Faymann abruptly resigned.

After being sworn in this week his successor, Christian Kern, admitted that the grand coalition was losing voters’ trust. His speech also revealed the constraints on the government. Mr Kern backed Mr Van der Bellen for president but was unable to offer the SPÖ’s formal support, because many of its members hope to join the FPÖ in coalition. The ÖVP feels the same. The government now has its last chance to show that it has not run out of ideas. There is plenty to do, from schools reform to slashing red tape to constitutional changes. Some 90,000 asylum-seekers need integrating. “The ÖVP, and in particular the SPÖ, thought reforms would lose them elections,” says Franz Schellhorn, director of Agenda Austria, a think-tank. “Now the opposite is true.”

The best lack all conviction

The centre is struggling to hold all over Europe. In Austria the mainstream parties did their best to turn politics into dull mush, yet it has suddenly turned hard and consequential. The SPÖ and ÖVP, having brought rising living standards and preserved social peace for decades, are visibly out of ideas. Many Austrians cannot take apocalyptic talk of the FPÖ’s rise seriously. In France voters unite behind candidates they dislike to block the far-right National Front. But Mr Van der Bellen can rely on no such coalition to propel him to the presidency. For voters of a conservative bent Mr Hofer may actually represent the safer option.

So in many respects this is an Austrian story as much as a European one. But these days every European election carries a larger meaning. Far-right parties across Europe will cheer a victory for Mr Hofer on Sunday; liberals will lament it. Austria is not about to return to the 1930s. But the election of Western Europe’s first far-right head of state would still mark a solemn moment. Austria’s do-nothing coalition is on the front line of a struggle that many other centrist parties across Europe are facing. Some appear to have given up. This is Austria’s problem. But it is also Europe’s.