Norbert Hofer candidate for presidential elections of Austria's Freedom Party. Credit: Ronald Zak/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.He campaigned on a platform of stopping the "Muslim invasion" and proposed building a wall on Austria's southern border to keep migrants out. Some have called him Austria's Donald Trump. But Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party, who was for a long time, the frontrunner in Austria's presidential elections last month, is also famously thoughtful and soft-spoken. He denies being right-wing and his election posters proclaimed him 'Stimme der Vernuft' or the voice of reason.
When Hofer lost by a whisker (the Freedom Party recently lodged a legal challenge to the result), newspaper articles across the world proclaimed variations on "phew" and "Europe breathes a sigh of relief". At the last moment, Austria opted for pro-refugee, ex-Green Party leader Alexander Van der Bellen. But Austria remains a country politically split down the middle between discontented working classes and comfortable urban elites and Hofer's narrow defeat is damaging for democracy in Europe. The millions of votes secured by the Freedom Party (FPO), and similar groups across Europe, raises several questions. How this could happen and is it all about 'immigration' or 'refugees'? What does it tell us about the ways in which European society is implicitly accepting the rise nationalist extremism?
