Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, looks set to welcome its first far-right Chancellor since World War II, in the form of Freedom Party head Herbert Kickl. This looks less like an anomaly than part of a trend that’s sweeping the developed West, so for those of us who believe in the value of liberal democracy and its institutions, how worried should we be?

A lot is being written about the accelerators of Austria’s nationalist phenomenon. These include Russian troll farms and alt-right networks, as well as the Austrian center-right’s decision to “normalize” the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) by adopting some of its ideas and inviting it to share power. Kickl himself is a former interior minister, who had police raid the country’s intelligence service offices in an attempt to discredit them.

But while these are valid concerns, focusing on external political factors that helped the FPO win 29% of the vote in September risks avoiding the core issue. For whatever malign influences there may have been, it’s the fertility of the soil onto which they fell that matters. And in Austria, the ground was rich.

Austria is unusual in a number of ways, not least in that it wasn’t forced to confront its Nazi past after World War II to the degree Germany was. There was a much less thorough purge of fascist elites and, at least until the 1980s, Austrians portrayed themselves as victims of German aggression, despite having for the most part been willing collaborators.

Hence the ability of Anton Reinthaller, a senior official in Austria’s wartime government with the rank of SS Brigade Leader, to establish a postwar political party,........

© Bloomberg