Abstract
Abstract The paper analyses and assesses social policy reforms of the conservative, far-right and right-wing populist coalition government in Austria between 2017 and 2019 in the light of the debates about welfare chauvinist, authoritarian and populist social policies. The latter had gained in importance over the previous years due to the upsurge of far-right and right-wing populist parties and the (at least partial) accommodation of mainstream parties to this tendency in many countries. The policies of the government were based on the view that the social problems associated with immigration were (at least) one of the main underlying causes for the problems affecting the Austrian society. The paper shows that the government initiated strategies to tackle these developments via a renationalisation of social policies. The analysis is focused on implemented and planned activities geared mainly towards the (former) margins of the Austrian welfare regime (social assistance, active labour market policies, unemployment assistance, youth integration policies), as well as on the ideological articulations the government uttered to justify these reforms via the combination of welfare chauvinist orientations with centre-right concerns about market dynamics and public finances. Our analysis concludes that nativist/racialised, nationalist and welfare chauvinist social policies transcend the distinction of deserving and non-deserving social groups, which raises the question about the social imaginaries that lie beneath the attempts of far-right political actors to shape societies through the reform of welfare.
Highlights
After only about one and a half years, the second attempt at establishing a coalition government between the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the far-right and right-wing populist1 Freedom Party (FPÖ) (Obinger/Tálos 2006; Tálos 2019) collapsed after a massive political scandal2 in early summer 2019, which involved the vice chancellor and the party whip of the Freedom party, led to the end of this government
Activities of the Austrian government – whose focus on means-tested benefits5 should come as no surprise, given the propensity of welfare chauvinist reform strategies to target such schemes, as immigrant beneficiaries tend to be overrepresented in these programmes due to their social situation (EnnserJedenastik 2018) – allows some insights to specify the concept of welfare chauvinism and its articulation with racialised and nationalist imaginaries of the development of society
To grasp the significance of the re-nationalised social policies, we focused on implemented and planned activities geared mainly against the margins of the Austrian welfare regime and tried to highlight their ideological underpinnings, which revealed a specific articulation of welfare chauvinist, authoritarian and populist dimensions, with traditional orientations of the centre right towards cost cutting and labour market dynamics in a specific way
Summary
After only about one and a half years, the second attempt at establishing a coalition government between the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the far-right and right-wing populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) (Obinger/Tálos 2006; Tálos 2019) collapsed after a massive political scandal in early summer 2019, which involved the vice chancellor and the party whip of the Freedom party, led to the end of this government. In other EU-countries (e.g. France, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Poland etc.) as well, far-right and right-wing populist parties have expanded their programmatic scope over the last at least two decades to include a specific perspective on social policies, which has been labelled welfare chauvinism (see below) (Ennser-Jedenastik 2018; Keskinen et al 2016) Many of these parties claim they want to defend social security for (deserving) hard working people while at the same time aiming at reducing access and entitlements for a number of groups of (allegedly non-deserving) “outsiders” – in particular migrants and certain other social groups of e.g. the (long-term) unemployed etc. Activities of the Austrian government – whose focus on means-tested benefits should come as no surprise, given the propensity of welfare chauvinist reform strategies to target such schemes, as immigrant beneficiaries tend to be overrepresented in these programmes due to their social situation (EnnserJedenastik 2018) – allows some insights to specify the concept of welfare chauvinism and its articulation with racialised and nationalist imaginaries of the development of society
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