The right-wing authoritarian FP is fighting on two fronts. The halo of the polls is increasingly being disenchanted, and radical frontman Herbert Kickl is being viewed more and more critically.
The party is currently leading in polls for the National Council election in the fall with around 28 percent. The conservative VP also failed miserably in Innsbruck. Your candidate Florian Tursky explicitly spoke out in favor of a coalition with the FP in the city government. Instead, the VP dissenter Johannes Anzengruber entered the runoff election for the mayor's office. An observation that should give the VP pause if they consider a new edition of the Ibiza coalition. The FP was unable to translate the national poll trend into election results for the second time in a row. In Innsbruck, polls predicted a narrow FP victory. At the ballot box, however, the party lost around three percent compared to its 2018 result and, with its result of 15 percent, fell far short of the national trend. The FP parliamentary group leader in the U-committee on the BVT affair, Hans-Jörg Jenewein, is said to have offered Ott a position in the secret service. Kickl strictly denied in parliament that he knew about the spy ring and pushed the responsibility onto the VP. The BVT-U Committee's final report already raised suspicions that files related to investigations against the extreme right had disappeared during the raid. A printout of an email between a FP police officer and a multi-convicted right-wing extremist was found Gottfried Küssel had disappeared. The head of operations did not want to explain why the email had been lost. In the 1990s, he organized military exercises in which the former FP Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache also took part. The newspaper previously reported on chats between Jenewein and a close employee of Kickl, who is considered a key figure in the neo-Nazi scene.