If you enter Austria from the west, near Bregenz on Lake Constance, with a little luck and the right meteorological conditions, images of stunning beauty will unfold between the water and the mountains. The peaks divide the weather, with rain fronts and clear skies competing for space, or dense fog spreading across the ground like mystical, glowing steam. When night falls further back in the High Alps in this geological spectacle called Austria, the peaks and summits soon start resembling the heads of animals, like monstrous bodies whose flanks are dotted with villages resembling Christmas ornaments. The geographic drama mellows to the east, flowing into more friendly hills until, finally, behind Graz, behind Vienna, in Burgenland, the Pannonian Basin is reached, and you come to the end of today's Austria. It's a beautiful country. That much must be said ... before saying anything else.
Everything else concerns the strange paths along which the country, its society and its political classes have been traveling for quite some time -- perhaps for a hundred years, perhaps even longer, but at the very least since this winter, since a new government has moved into its offices in Vienna's magnificent palaces. The country is now governed by a coalition that likes to refer to itself "turquoise-blue," a reference to the two parties' political colors -- turquoise represents the party of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and blue the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). But going by what we've learned about political color affiliations from history, it would be more accurate to describe it as a "black-brown" coalition. The black, of course, is the traditional color associated with conservatives. And the brown is the color of right-wing extremists and the Nazis.
The doubts began on the very first day of the chancellorship of Kurz, a 31-year-old native son of Vienna who comes from an upper middle-class family and has the gentle face of an apostle. Kurz has a few semesters of law school under his belt to go with a successful career as a politician with the mainstream, Christian-conservative Austrian People's Party (ÖVP). He had the option of forming a coalition government together with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) after October's election. It still would have allowed him to become chancellor and would have produced the kind of coalition government that Austria has had for decades. But he ultimately decided against an alliance with moderate leftists and left-wing liberals and instead preferred to form a partnership with the hard right and right-wing extremists from the so-called Freedom Party, which is known throughout Europe for its penchant for radical right-wing populism. Since then, a hail of slurs and apersions has spread across Austria, a constant flirtation with the vulgar and primitive, a sketchy interplay of words, actions and symbols.
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