To understand Austria one must have read or listened to those Austrians who loved it and ultimately spoke the harshest words about it.

The writer Thomas Bernhard, for example, in “Heldenplatz” expressed the somewhat leveling assessment that all his countrymen are Nazis. For a country that in the 1930s had experienced regular class wars, with armed groups from both ends of the political spectrum, the excommunication should be taken as mere literary exaggeration.

On the other handin March 1938 this Heroes’ Square cit was met for the first and last time in its history by an enthusiastic crowd when Adolf Hitler entered Vienna in triumph after the Anschluss, as it was finally established to call the “swallowing” of the “Alpine Republic” by National Socialism, without not a single rifle fell.

The Austrians managed to go down in history as victims of Nazism. They managed to erase from the perception of public opinion worldwide that in a village in Upper Austria, in Braunau, the man who would give his name to many children, born in the late 1930s/40s, was born. There were many Adolfs in the country’s countryside in the following post-war decades, who of course were not to blame for this.

The successful petty bourgeois

The Austrians, “tiny” next to their huge neighbour, Germany, have perfected the art of shrinking and looking even smaller when the conversation turns to blame-seeking. They were always the “Mitläufer”, the ones who ran with the flow, never leading and not exactly trailing. The Austrian’s ability to slip out of difficult situations was perhaps more vividly described than Bernhard by Helmut Kwaltinger with “Mr. Karl”, a play between theater and political satire that he wrote together with Karl Mertz.

Mr. Carl, a clerk in a grocery store, is a poor, opportunistic, lazy, slightly racist, slightly sexist, fugitive but successful, who always goes where the wind blows, who has no problem justifying anything to himself, who is comfortable in any situation, even parasitically at someone else’s expense. In a one-hour monologue that naturally provoked heaps of backlash from aggrieved petty bourgeois when it first came out way back in 1961, it was like seeing the psychograph of a country you say never took itself seriously.

Searching for identity

This is the great contradiction of Austria. In the country that prides itself on excessive micro-megaloism about Mozart and the schnitzel, the Far Right manages to fall and rise again with a narrative that actually says “two peoples, one nation”. When in 2000 the Free Party (FPÖ) entered government for the first time together with the Christian Democrats, then their leader was Jörg Haider, a carrier of the theory of “belonging” to the German nation. In fact, this is what many of the executives of the same party that consistently leads the polls and will probably vindicate them this Sunday, if what happened last Sunday in Brandenburg does not happen.

Their leader, the “tough” Herbert Kickle who aspires to be chancellor, has completely opened the party to the so-called “Identifiers” of Michael Zellner, a “theoretician” who goes back and forth between the two countries, demagogues against a dark alleged conspiracy, which wants to replace the noble nation with foreigners, heathens.

This time things are much more dangerous than the second term of government of the Liberals from 2017 to 2019, in coalition with the “funny” Christian Democrat Sebastian Kurz. At the time, the head of the FPÖ was Christian Strache, who, as it proved with the “Ibiza scandal”, had more of the stuff of a “lamoy” than a fanatic. A refined, visibly evolved version of Mr. Carl. He could be a petty crook in a Woody Allen movie. But Kickle is not just a caricature.

Like the Lernaean Hydra

Having lived in this country for 14 years, I have friends and memories there. On the one hand I understand why the FPÖ manages to survive and on the other hand I am disappointed every time I see it like the Lernaean Hydra rearing a new, threatening head. I feel sorry for the other Austria, the democratic and open-minded one, that I know exists. Some claim that the very harsh pandemic measures that angered citizens were to blame. Others again enlist immigration as the reason for all the woes. But if you used to open the phone book you would see that half the names were Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Turkish. Many Austrians hosted Syrian refugees for weeks in their homes during the great refugee crisis.

Now they are labeled angry. Not scared. This is what a political scientist claimed in the columns of a conservative newspaper. That is why they turn to the Far Right. But if the inhabitants of one of the richest countries in Europe, with the highest quality of life, are angry, then what should we expect to see elsewhere? Perhaps the answer should be sought precisely in the ostrich mentality of the country’s “elites”.

The FPÖ is not a new party, like the AfD in Germany. It is the evolution of the League of Independents that was created after the war to house, but also to reform “repentant” Nazis. Those who had… gone astray. It is a party with tradition and a full “resume”. As for Kickle, he once wrote speeches for Haider and later broke down election strategies for Strache. He is not a newcomer, without a past.

The lonely Kickle

The other parties argue that there is no way they can work with Herbert Kickle, who bills himself as the next “people’s chancellor”. And the former Green (another contradiction) President of the Republic, Alexander van der Bellen, has hinted that he will never swear in Kickle as prime minister. But is the face the problem? Mr. Karls are also present in other parties. Especially in that one, the Christian Democratic Party, which once ignored the international outcry and decided to lie down in the same bed as the devil.

What are the other solutions? They all seem problematic. Center-right and Greens have ruled together until now, but this relationship seems to have come to an end and the percentages will not come out anyway. A coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, once, when their sizes were different, described as “grand”, is always seen as the best fertilizer for the Liberal populists to churn. The liberal NEOS prefers to trumpet the supremacy of the free market over the certainty of the opposition’s bases. Only as a third pole could it function based on its single-digit percentages. And the experience of the three-party government from Germany seems extremely dissuasive.

On the other hand, of course, one would say: Austria is that. Mr. Carl will always find the solution. Or as the actor Carl Mercatz wrote as the title for the script of an “epic” TV series from the 1970s: “A true Viennese never sinks.”