Nonetheless Mr Kurz’s vice-chancellor, the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader Heinz-Christian Strache, is sceptical about any ban. He would prefer the Identitarians be put under closer observation.
After the police raid, Mr Strache said he and his party had nothing to do with the Identitarians. But in fact the connections between the two are well-documented.
In April 2016, Mr Strache praised the Identitarian Movement for being a “young” and “peaceful ... non-left citizens’ movement.” A year prior, he was pictured meeting Identitarians at a Styrian guesthouse.
Mr Strache has also used social media to promote the idea at the core of the Identitarians’ ideology: of the state supporting a Bevölkerungsaustausch, the replacement of white Austrians with Muslim immigrants.
FPÖ interior minister Herbert Kickl, who opposition politician Peter Pilz recently called the minister of “right-wing extremists, identitarians, and neo-Nazis”, spoke in 2016 at “Defenders of Europe,” an extreme-right gathering in Linz which included Austria’s Identitarian Movement.
He began his speech: “This is an audience as I would wish it and picture it.”
Because of Mr Kickl, Austrian intelligence services are evermore being excluded from the activities of the Club de Berne, the European Union’s intelligence-sharing forum.
The opposition, led by the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), has called for Mr Kickl’s resignation.
“An interior minister that has such close ties to right-wing extremists and the Identitarians is a security risk for Austria,” the SPÖ’s Thomas Drozda said.
The links extend down to the state and local level, with Freedom Party politicians marching with the Identitarian Movement as recently as last year.
And just this week, it was reported that the FPÖ branch in Linz, via its associated greater German nationalist fraternity “Arminia Czernowitz”, shared an address with the local Identitarians.
This news sparked Mr Kurz to warn he wouldn’t abide a “soft approach to right-wing extremism” and tell the Freedom Party to clean up its act and identify where there are connections to the Identitarian Movement and undo them.
But as the veteran Austrian political columnist Hans Rauscher noted, the Identitarians and the Freedom Party are “brothers in spirit”.
And therein lies Mr Kurz’s problem: to outlaw the Identitarian Movement is one thing, but that same ideology he opposes and drives that ethno-national movement is also, by way of the FPÖ, inside his government.
As such, Mr Rauscher believes, the Chancellor has two choices: call new elections and form a new government with the centre and centre-left—or stay in coalition with the Freedom Party and accept the consequences.
