Opinion | You Can’t Trust the Far Right

With just a few days to go before the European parliamentary elections, Austria’s government is in a tailspin. The implications for the rest of the Continent are profound.

On Sunday, Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor and leader of the center-right Austrian People’s Party, called for snap elections following the resignation of Heinz-Christian Strache, Mr. Kurz’s vice chancellor and the head of the far-right Freedom Party. Days before, a two-year-old video surfaced in German media showing Mr. Strache offering government contracts and a stake in one of Austria’s largest newspapers in exchange for Russian support for his party. It turned out that the footage, whose source remains unknown, was a sting operation. But if its goal was to expose Mr. Strache’s cynical willingness to sell out his country to a foreign power with a well-known record of undermining elections, it worked.

When Mr. Kurz brought the Freedom Party into government in 2017 as the junior coalition partner, he claimed — and many believed — that doing so would “civilize” the party, which was founded by ex-Nazis and which regularly trafficked in racist and anti-Semitic tropes. (In 2012, Mr. Strache posted a cartoon on Facebook depicting a hooked-nose banker wearing Star of David cuff links, which he claimed was a critique of “greedy bankers” rather than anti-Semitic.) The argument was that by bringing the far right into mainstream politics, its leaders would have to tone down their radicalism and learn to appeal to a broader section of voters. With parties similar to — and allied with — the Freedom Party on the rise across Europe, this seemed to some like a sensible strategy.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Not only did the Freedom Party fail to move away from its hard-right positions, it pulled the center right closer to its own extreme ideas on immigration and Islam. But the latest revelations demonstrate even more why Mr. Kurz should never have trusted the Freedom Party in the first place.