Austria's polarising far-right leader bids to become chancellor

By Francois Murphy

VIENNA (Reuters) - He is abrasive, provocative and has one of the lowest approval ratings among top Austrian politicians, but far-right leader Herbert Kickl is still the man to beat in Sunday's parliamentary election, which has at times resembled a referendum on him.

"Kickl here, Kickl there, Kickl everywhere," he joked at a typically rowdy, beer-filled rally in February.

Weeks earlier Chancellor Karl Nehammer framed the election as a choice "between him and me", at a conservative People's Party (OVP) meeting featuring lengthy video footage of Kickl.

"I don't know if I should feel more honoured or stalked!" Kickl said.

Such barbs punctuate Kickl's withering tirades against the unpopular OVP-Greens coalition government, helping make him arguably the most entertaining speaker in parliament.

He and his Freedom Party (FPO) have the wind at their backs. The economy is poised to shrink for a second year running and inflation has remained stuck above the European Union average.

Polls have long shown the Islam-critical FPO, which wants tougher immigration laws, leading a two-horse race with the OVP. The winner will need to form a coalition to govern.

Kickl is loathed by other party leaders, who have vowed not to work under him. He has shown no indication he could emulate Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders, who in March stepped aside so a government could form after his party won in 2023.

The FPO's lead is now wafer thin, and the OVP has stepped up its depictions of Kickl, an ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, as an extremist threat to security and democracy.

"It's impossible to form a government with someone who adores conspiracy theories, who describes the WHO, the World Health Organization, as the next world government and the economic forum in Davos as preparation for global domination," Nehammer said this month.

Nehammer has left the door open to working with the FPO without Kickl. The parties, which overlap on immigration policy and cutting taxes, were in coalition from 2017 until 2019, when Kickl's predecessor Heinz-Christian Strache was shown in a sting video offering to fix state contracts.

Kickl has long been a central figure in the FPO, but he regularly lands at the bottom of an OGM survey for news agency APA of leading politicians' popularity. Only the departing speaker of parliament Wolfgang Sobotka fares worse.

Kickl has cast himself as the future "Volkskanzler", or people's chancellor - a term the Nazis used for Adolf Hitler, though others have also used it.

In 2010, Kickl said he opposed deeming Hitler's Waffen-SS "collectively guilty" for war crimes. The FPO's first leader in 1955 had been a senior SS officer and a Nazi minister.

Kickl and the FPO oppose sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, saying it violates Austria's neutrality.

He has embraced conspiracy theories, claiming the de-worming agent ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, as did former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Yet his campaign against coronavirus restrictions like lockdowns and vaccine mandates helped revive the party's fortunes after it crashed out of government in Austria, which had the highest rate of vaccine holdouts in the EU.

'CLEAR AND VERY FOCUSED STRATEGIST'

Kickl was interior minister and Nehammer a senior OVP official during a coalition between their parties that imploded in 2019.

After the sting video, then-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz had Kickl dismissed as interior minister. Nehammer subsequently became interior minister, but when a 2020 deadly jihadist attack in Vienna revealed serious failings at the domestic intelligence agency Nehammer oversaw, he blamed Kickl.

That was a reference to a 2018 police raid of the agency's offices that opponents say Kickl orchestrated to purge it of OVP loyalists.

Kickl denies that, but President Alexander Van der Bellen, who will oversee the formation of the next government, has criticised the FPO chief for the raid and hinted he would not let him become chancellor.

Kickl cuts a far more serious figure than predecessors like Strache and Joerg Haider. He shuns parties and has competed in Ironman-style ultra-triathlons.

"He is a very, very clear and very focused strategist, and as we see every day he is very much on the attack and even aggressive," political analyst Thomas Hofer said.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Dave Graham and Sharon Singleton)