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).