Hegemonic discourses of difference and inequality: Right-wing organisations in Austria

Abstract

Austria is one of the first European countries to have a successful right-wing extremist party-the Freedom Party Austria (FPÖ). This chapter aims at answering the question why right-wing extremism has been successful and why it is therefore difficult for anti-racist movements to counter FPÖ‘s discourses. We approach this question first, by analysing the discursive strategies of the party and second, by analysing the resonance of this strategy in right-wing populist movements, namely the anti-mosque movements in Vienna (former BPÖ/Bewegung pro Österreich/Movement pro Austria) as well as identifying counter-strategies to these discriminatory and racist discourses in Austria. Our research is based on interviews with members of the right-wing party and groups as well as on interviews with representatives of NGOs engaged in fighting racism and discrimination. Applying content analysis and frame analysis tools, our main aim is to identify how right-wing populist groups construct binary groups of ‘us’'‘and the ‘others’ as well as gender binaries, as these strategies successfully create societal problems, enemies who cause them, and victims who are affected by them and hence build an ‘us’group represented by right-wing extremist groups. Moreover we aim at deconstructing strategies of consensus building and hegemony around the issues of migration. The article begins with a context section, which outlines the rise of the populist right wing in Austria starting with the transition of the FPÖ when Jörg Haider became the party leader in the late 1980s. This section will contextualise the early emergence of right-wing populism in Austria’s political settings as well as in neoliberal transformations of the country after its EU accession. This context also explains the role of other right-wing and anti-migrant actors in the country. After a presentation of our methodological and theoretical approaches we show the metaphors, symbols, narratives and frames used by right-wing extremist parties and group members-especially when referring to the ‘problem’ of migration, Islam, the EU and (changing) gender relations. These chains of equivalents, the article argues, create a hegemonic discourse of inequality and hence exclusion. The second part of the analysis, which outlines civil societies’ strategies to fight racism and ‘othering’ on the grounds of ethnicity, nationality, gender or sexuality is then presented. Our aim in this regard is to detect whether the counter-strategies are adequately to fight the discursive strategies of the Austrian right-wing groups.