Austria’s accidental hard-right leader

“If a party is a boat then I prefer to be in the engine-room rather than at the captain’s dinner.” Thus spoke Herbert Kickl when Heinz-Christian Strache was still boss of Austria’s hard-right Freedom Party (fpö), according to “Kickl and the Destruction of Europe”, a new biography that will be published (in German) on April 15th. Lacking in charm, Mr Kickl was always meant to be the machinist rather than the captain. “I think he is still sometimes surprised to be the leader of the fpö,” says Robert Treichler, one of the two authors (the other is Gernot Bauer, also a journalist at Profil, an Austrian weekly).

Nothing in his early years and even in his first decades as an apparatchik in the fpö seemed to indicate that Mr Kickl would become a serious contender for Austria’s chancellorship at elections this autumn. Born in 1968, he grew up in a working-class family in Carinthia. He was a good student. He liked the Beatles and the cargo pants he bought at the American army shop in Spittal. His grandfather Florian had been a Nazi, but that was the case for many of his generation in Carinthia.