This country report examines the relationship between populism and Euroscepticism in Austria between 2008 and 2025. Austria has been a stronghold of populism since the late 1980s, but also of Euroscepticism, which rose sharply shortly amongst Austrian citizens soon after the country joined the European Union (EU) in 1995. The study reveals an almost perfect link between populism and Euroscepticism in Austria, as all four Eurosceptic parties that managed to enter the Austrian or the European parliament in the period of investigation were also populist parties. By winning between sixteen and 30 percent of the vote, these parties ensured that Euroscepticism consistently played an important role in Austrian politics in the period studied. This was mainly due to the radical-right Austrian Freedom Party, which by far was most successful electorally, and increased significantly its populist EU critique over time both in terms of salience and radicalism. This, it is argued, time and again had a mitigating effect on the pro-EU stances of Austria’s main centre-left and -right mainstream parties (the Social Democrats and the People’s Party), but also on the positions taken by Austria on the EU level (especially during the FPÖ’s participation in government from 2017–9).
Eric Miklin (Wed,) studied this question.