Wednesday, June 26, 2013
5.60 (PC Hoofthuis)
Scholarship has frequently treated the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) as an episodic phenomenon, attributing its extraordinary electoral success to the actions taken by its singular political leader Jörg Haider. Widely perceived as a largely-de-institutionalized formation, the FPÖ was regarded as an organization in which all essential decisions were taken by an authoritarian party leader and rubberstamped by a cast of functionaries who depended politically and organizationally exclusively on the leader himself. While there was good reason to view the Freedom Party in the past as a quasi authoritarian leader-party with a weak institutional component, we may be at a loss to explain its current return strength. Not only has the party survived the loss of its founder and major figurehead while managing a near catastrophic collapse in the polls and counteracting the emergence of a political rival, but the party has more quickly than expected returned to its former strength in the polls. Past analyses that the FPÖ may have overlooked that the Freedom Party has always been also a member party of between 30,000 and 50,000 card carrying members along with a dense bottom-up territorial organization. As political circumstances and political fortunes changed, the organizational aspects began to matter significantly and explain why the party not only survived the exodus of its erstwhile leader from the party but was able to return to political strength within one electoral cycle. In short, this paper draws on the results of a survey of the Freedom Party to see to what extent organizational aspects and its operation as a “normal party” can account for the FPÖ resilience and ability to cope with political change.
