Johannes Huebner, Norbert Hofer
Fear campaign drove Austrian swing voters away from Hofer
Norbert Hofer, the Austrian Freedom Party candidate has confirmed his intention to run again in 2022. Hofer lost to Alexander van der Bellen after the Greens launched a campaign of fear to persuade swing voters to turn to a "safe" candidate.
Published: December 10, 2016, 8:08 am
Marine Le Pen congratulated Hofer nonetheless for his courage: “Congratulations to the FPÖ who fought with courage. The next legislative elections will be those of their victory! MLP,” she tweeted.
Le Pen, the leader of France’s Front National, is part of the same bloc in the European parliament as the Freedom Party lead by Heinz-Christian Strache. Strache is currently leading polls for the parliamentary vote ahead of the Social Democrats.
Hofer’s campaign manager, Herbert Kickl, who is also the secretary of the Freedom Party, attributed the defeat to “the establishment – which pitched in once again to block, to stonewall and to prevent renewal” according to The Guardian.
Reinhold Lopatka, head of the parliamentary group of the centre-right ÖVP, also speculated that fear about Austria’s EU membership would probably have played a role in winning Van der Bellen votes in regional districts, most of which profited from EU subsidies, The Guardian reported.
According to an Austrian ORF poll, 65% of Van der Bellen’s voters had cited his pro-EU attitudes as the main reason for rooting for the candidate.
A Freedom Party MP, Johannes Hübner, told the Russian think tank, Kathehon in an interview that Hofer fought a near-perfect campaign, but that fear-mongering by his opponent had weighed in heavily.
“I think nothing went wrong in the campaign. It was almost perfect. Nothing is perfect, but it was close to being perfect. No one would ever know why some of the people who voted for our candidate in springtime did not vote [for him] again. It was not a big number.
“My feeling is that the massive negative campaign against Hofer in the last three to four weeks, financed by private persons, had some impact, because we had to battle for votes from parties who had never voted for the Freedom Party or a candidate fielded by us.”
Hübner says for that reason, “classical swing voters” had decided to play it safe.
“Negative campaigning sinks into your subconsciousness, if you are not an active follower of politics, it can have an impact.
“If you link for example one candidate like Hofer to being pro-death penalty, to being pro-isolating Austria, to being pro getting Austria out of the European Union, to being pro endangering our jobs by cutting access to export markets, and all that negative campaigning, well if you are not rooted in our camp, if you are a swing voter and undecided,” he said, adding in that case voters would rather choose a less risky option.
In February 2012, Hübner and his party colleague Johann Gudenus visited the Chechen, Ramsan Kadyrov, who had been sought in Austria for incitement to murder. Gudenus then agreed with Kadyrov that the Chechens in Austria were “almost exclusively asylum fakers and economic refugees” who could safely return home. The visit attracted massive criticism from, among others, Amnesty International (AI) and the Greens.
Hübner, who studied law and works as a lawyer in Vienna, said the fact that other parties supported the Green candidate, made the Austian election different, because in Italy both left and right political forces had joined together to get rid of prime minister Matteo Renzi in their referendum.
Hofer remains as joint acting President until Van der Bellen is sworn into office, which is due to occur on 26 January 2017.
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