This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

Austria does usually not make international political headlines, but managed to do so on 28 September when the country’s main two extreme right wing parties, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by H.C. Strache and the Alliance for Austria’s Future (BZÖ) led by Jörg Haider, together won 29% of the parliamentary election vote, giving the lie to those who claim that the extreme right is going to be marginal in Austria.

The only other recent occasions when events in the alpine republic made the international media sit up and take notice were in 1986, when Kurt Waldheim was elected president after an antisemitic election campaign and, in 1999, when the FPÖ, then led by Haider, received 27% of the vote, also in parliamentary elections, but this latest instance is even more significant.

Certainly, it perplexed some foreign journalists. “How come” they asked, “that in the fourth richest country of the European Union (EU), where unemployment is one of the lowest in Europe and in a country called a few decades ago by the Pope “a happy island”, two right extreme parties received 29 percent of the vote?”

Other questions are simultaneously raised: is this result due only to the legacy of the Nazi period as some believe and what does the fact, that 40% of voters under 30 years voted for the extreme right signify?

The answers are complex. The FPÖ and BZÖ made inroads into the voting base of the Social Democrats (SPÖ), especially in the so-called workers’ districts of Vienna, to such an extent that more blue collar workers voted for them than for SPÖ.

The two far-right outfits were able to mobilize voting support with the promises to protect voters against foreigners and against unemployment, using xenophobic slogans like “Austria for the Austrians”, “Stop the foreigner flood” and “Stop asylum abuse”.

Because of the fact that heightened immigration into Austria has not been entirely unproblematic and because the left has denied that any problems exist, the extreme right has been able to propose its utterly simplistic and populists answers to a complex situation. Before and during the election campaign, however, there was nowhere near enough opposition voiced to the racist and xenophobic incitement of the BZÖ and FPÖ.

When the latter split in 2002 and Haider founded the BZÖ, journalists and politicians concluded that Haider would never again be as popular as in 1999. However, ORF, the state radio and TV station, helped change all that by giving him every opportunity for political self-presentation, enabling his BZÖ to become the fourth party.

Many Austrians like to see themselves as victims. Indeed, for more than 50 years Austria has assiduously presented itself as the first victim of Nazism, forgetting the role of so many Austrian perpetrators of Nazi crimes and forgetting the fact that most Austrians were happy to be bystanders and onlookers. The FPÖ now has a new variation on the theme, presenting Austria as the victim of the European Union (EU).

And, in an important publication of one of its front organizations, the monthly Aula, one can often find explicit antisemitic propaganda. In a country of more than 8 million inhabitants, where most people never see a Jew and where only 7,000 Jews are members of Jewish communities, one can speak almost of an antisemitic consensus. This is also probably the reason there is no serious political opposition to the recent deal between the big partly state-owned Austrian energy concern ÖMV and Iran.

The abysmal role of the SPÖ also has to be mentioned in this connection. Bruno Kreisky (SPÖ chancellor from 1970 until 1983) had five former Nazis in his first government. His prolonged campaign against Simon Wiesenthal was also antisemitic and, during the seventies, he defended Friedrich Peter, then head of the FPÖ, even after it had been disclosed by Wiesenthal that Peter served in a company of the Waffen-SS involved in murdering civilians in wartime Eastern Europe.

Outside interest in these matters was minimal, though, probably because the SPÖ, so allergic to antisemitism when it came or comes from the right, is blind to antisemitism in its own ranks. The SPÖ’s attitude to the extreme right is an ambivalent combination of public declarations about not wanting a coalition with it but also voting with it in parliament.

Just a few weeks before Election Day, Werner Faymann the new SPÖ leader wrote a letter to the part owner of the Vienna gutter daily Neue Kronenzeitung (NKZ) - a paper notorious for the racism and xenophobia found in its pages - and promised a plebiscite before any crucial decisions about Austria’s relationship with the EU.

The Social Democrats are being handicapped by their own fickleness and lack of principle. The three biggest parties usually nominate the three presidents of the Austrian parliament. The FPÖ has nominated Martin Graf, a former member of the right-wing extreme student fraternity, Olympia, for the position. (When Holocaust denier David Irving was arrested in Austria in November 2005 he was on his way to give a lecture to Olympia). The SPÖ’s politicians hastened to declare that they would also vote for Graf. Only the fifth, and smallest, party in the Austrian parliament, the Greens have pledged to vote against him.

In Austria, playing with racist, antisemitic and xenophobic sentiments is tolerated by society and by the political elite and politicians who play this tawdry game are accepted into the mainstream.

The results of continued failure to resist ethnic exclusion and racist demagogy were made obvious on 28 September. The longer term consequences are yet to be seen.