Austrian far-right leader meets president as expectations mount he will be asked to form government

VIENNA (AP) — Austrian Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl met the country's president on Monday as expectations mounted that he would be tasked with trying to form a new government, which would be the first led by the far right since World War II.

Kickl's party won Austria's parliamentary election in September, taking 28.8% of the vote and beating outgoing Chancellor Karl Nehammer's conservative Austrian People's Party into second place.

But in October, President Alexander Van der Bellen tasked Nehammer with trying to form a new government after Nehammer's party said it wouldn't go into government with the Freedom Party under Kickl and others refused to work with the Freedom Party at all. Those efforts to form a governing alliance without the far right collapsed in the first few days of the new year and Nehammer said Saturday that he would resign.

The People's Party then signaled that it might be open to working under Kickl. Negotiations between the two aren't guaranteed to succeed, but there are no longer any other realistic coalition options in the current parliament and polls suggest that a new election soon could strengthen the Freedom Party further.

The far right and the conservatives have governed together before, but on previous occasions with the Freedom Party as the junior partner. Most recently, they ran Austria from 2017 to 2019 in a government in which Kickl — a 56-year-old with a taste for provocation — served as interior minister. It collapsed in a scandal surrounding the Freedom Party's leader at the time.

In its election program titled “Fortress Austria,” the Freedom Party has called for the “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.

The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defense project launched by Germany. Kickl has criticized “elites” in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.