EUROPEAN TRADE UNIONS DIALOGUE TRADE UNIONS AND RIGHT-WING POPULISM IN EUROPE Country Study Austria Saskja Schindler and Livia Schubert January 2023 INTRODUCTION Right-wing extremist and populist parties have expe­rienced a significant increase in popularity over the past two decades in multiple European countries. In Austria, the far-right populist Freiheitliche Partei Ös­terreich(FPÖ; Freedom Party of Austria) has been making strong gains in regional and national elec­tions since the 1990s. As a result, the party has been involved in coalition governments at the regional and national levels on multiple occasions(2000–2005 and 2017–2019 on the national level; 2015–ongoing in Upper Austria; and 2015–2020 in Burgenland) and even as the sole government in Carinthia under Jörg Haider. Since the turn of the century, the FPÖ 1 has explicitly targeted workers and, like numerous other right-wing populist parties in Europe(Lefkofridi/Michel 2017), has transformed its rhetoric from an openly neoliber ­al position on welfare state issues to a welfare-chau­vinist(Kitschelt 1995) or national-exclusionist social policy position. In Austria, this has been expressed through slogans such as“Fair. Sozial. Heimattreu” 1 In the following, we refer to the FPÖ as a right-wing populist party to, on the one hand, facilitate comparison with other country studies, and on the other, to direct the focus to the party’s structure as a populist agitator. Authors from the Documentation Centre for Austrian Resistance emphasise that the term right­wing populism, when applied to the FPÖ,“can only describe the form of agitation; the ideological core elements[…] are to be examined to be examined using terms from the concept of right-wing extremism.[…] The FPÖ is, at its core, a right-wing extremist party, even though not all its voters share in this ideology or can be described as right-wing extremists”(Bailer 2016: 1). [Fair. Social. Patriotic]. The working class and the so­called“everyday man” are the central targets of this agitation. Instead of showing international solidarity with the working class, the FPÖ propagates the juxta­position of national solidarity of‘autochthonous’ Aus ­trians against an imagined threat from outsiders, i.e., immigrants. The party thus shifts questions and con ­flicts about income distribution from the vertical lev ­el between the exploited and the exploiting to the horizontal level between different exploited groups (Flecker et al. 2018). For Austrian trade unions, this leads first to ideologi ­cal rivalry vis-à-vis questions of solidarity and social policy. Secondly, the FPÖ’s policy while in govern ­ment, as well as their opposition rhetoric, has been aimed at weakening the organised representation of workers’ interests. Both the Arbeiterkammer(AK; Austrian Chamber of Labour) and the trade union, in the form of the Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund (ÖGB; Austrian Trade Union Federation) and its sub-unions, as well as self-governance in the various social insurance and welfare state institutions(Public Employment Service, health insurance, and general accident insurance) have been and continue to be the targets of verbal attacks as well as(partly implement ­ed) plans, to curtail their financial resources and ca ­pacity for co-determination by altering the composi ­1