Party politics is like a ship, Herbert Kickl once observed, where he would rather “be in the engine room than at the captain’s table”.
For 30 years the 55-year-old Austrian politician did just that by keeping well-oiled the engine of Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ).
As party leader since 2021, Kickl’s FPÖ has overcome years of crisis and scandal to top Austrian opinion polls, with 27 per cent support in advance of parliamentary elections on September 29th.
But does this populist backroom engineer have what it takes to become Austria’s self-declared “people’s chancellor”?
Kickl was born in 1968 in rural Carinthia in southern Austria. Schoolmates remember him as a contrarian in army surplus clothes, pushing back against what he later called Austria’s “low-rent left”: the near-monopoly of social democracy on 1970s Austrian politics and public life.
Electrified by a school visit from Jörg Haider, Carinthia’s then perma-tanned new FPÖ regional leader, Kickl later abandoned his studies to work his way up the party ranks.
The FPÖ is the grandfather of European far-right politics, founded in 1956 by former Nazis and SS officers. But it was Kickl’s provocative slogans and zingers that helped the party repackage itself in the 1990s – and helped Haider into power in Carinthia, then his party into government in Vienna in 2000.
Kickl’s talent for rhyming rhetoric that flirts with xenophobia and racist stereotypes has delighted some in Austria and horrified others, but given the modern FPÖ steady traction and support.
A lover of extreme sports and long hikes, Kickl is known to test slogans and rhetoric aloud until it hits home like an advertising jingle, he explained in 2010, “linking emotion to content or opening the door to content via emotion”.
This year’s election posters show Kickl’s face and present his FPÖ in a serving function: “You’re the boss, I’m the instrument” says one; another borrows from the Our Father: “Thy will be done.”
In its “Austria First” 2024 election programme the self-described “social homeland party” promises to transform Austria into a “fortress” against immigration and related dangers.
The FPÖ vows to defend freedom and Europe’s Christian roots and promotes family as “a partnership between a man and a woman with common children”.
Austria “is not a country of immigration”, the FPÖ says, and it wants an EU of nations and peoples, not of institutions and integration that push “forced multiculturalism, globalisation and mass immigration”.
“Our goal has to be to carve out the healthy seed of asylum from the rotten fruit of mass migration,” said Kickl at the FPÖ manifesto launch. “All are looking on, letting this irregular migration happen ... and we are going ever-further into this negative spiral.”
Thanks to his early mastery of social media, Kickl is far more present on TikTok and Instagram than on the campaign trail, where in-person appearances are few and far between.
“For a politician, especially a party leader, Kickl is surprisingly shy and inhibited,” note Gernot Bauer and Robert Treichler in their recent biography of the politician. “Kickl doesn’t want any unpleasant surprises, he wants to retain control of the story.”
His skill at controlling the narrative helped the FPÖ into power in Vienna for a second time in 2017. There, as a controversial interior minister, he questioned the European human rights convention and proposed renaming refugee facilities “departure centres”.
Kickl was fired from government in 2021, a first in postwar Austria, during the blowback over a cash-for-favours sting operation against then FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache.
After taking over the party leadership, Kickl embraced the pandemic to reframe and rebrand the scandal-tainted FPÖ as the lone defender of individual freedom against a political-medical cartel.
“Kickl has revived the core Haider-era FPÖ brand, there is a whole theme park of issues here that Kickl himself helped devise,” says Dr Thomas Hofer, a leading Austrian political analyst.
He describes the Kickl method as “throwing out emotional anchors” to harness voters uneasy over migration, inflation, energy costs, climate measures and gender culture wars.
“This approach appears authentic to many disappointed voter groups,” adds Hofer, “because it plays to – and serves – the ongoing furore.”
But Kickl-style furore can come at a cost. As interior minister, his push to take control of Austrian intelligence services and a scandal over missing secret documents saw concerned intelligence partners end their co-operation with Austria.
Kickl’s main political rivals dub him a “security risk” for Austria, but know that they may find themselves sitting opposite him for exploratory talks next month.
With no natural allies for an FPÖ-lead government, and lacking Haider-style charisma, some suggest Kickl may go the route of Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders: stay out of power but allow his party join government in a junior role.
But those who’ve known Kickl from his early days say his deep mistrust of almost everyone makes him an impossible political partner in the long run.
“Herbert reminds me of someone with a substance addiction, but in his case the substance is political moods and majorities,” said one long-term acquaintance. “He’s an expert at spotting what people need now, and manipulates language to shift the public mood. He loves recognition for that but, like all addicts, he will never be satisfied.”
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