ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the electoral strategies of the freedom party (FPO) from 1986 and 2006. It examines these parties' electoral performance, focusing in particular upon the extent to which changes to their goals and to the electoral strategies they employed to achieve them were reflected in the profile and motivations of their vote. Once in government, the FPO lost most of its electoral support, whereupon Jorg Haider took over the leadership and made the FPO Western Europe's most successful right-wing populist party. Haider shared Steger's opposition to Austrian consociationalism and realized office was a prerequisite for structural reform, but was convinced a governing party with merely 5 percent of the vote was inherently incapable of effecting system-level change and was susceptible to being politically neutered. Austrian right-wing populism is likely to persist for supply-side reasons also. For, the FPO has reverted to unbridled populist vote maximization targeted at blue-collar voters.
