The far-right Freedom Party (FPO), founded in the 1950s by a man who had been a senior officer in Hitler’s elite paramilitary SS, is on the verge of taking power in Austria.

On January 6, the country’s President Alexander Van der Bellen reluctantly granted FPO leader Herbert Kickl – who is, like Hitler once was, referred to as “the people’s chancellor” by his party – the mandate to form a coalition government after a centrist bid to assemble one without the FPO collapsed unexpectedly.

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The FPO, which came first in the September election with 29 percent of the vote, is now in talks to form a coalition with the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (OVP).

Other than the FPO, this was not a preferred outcome for any Austrian faction. Like all other major parties, the OVP had entered the election on a promise to never form a coalition government with the party with Nazi roots. Yet after it became clear that a non-FPO alternative could not be agreed, the OVP swiftly changed its leader to walk back on this promise and participate in coalition negotiations.

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The anticipated FPO-OVP coalition will not be the first one to involve the far-right party in Austria’s recent history. In fact, the FPO was the junior partner in an OVP-led coalition government as recently as in 2019. But it would mark the first time that the FPO is the senior partner, and thus the main decision-maker, in an Austrian government.

Political developments in Austria – a landlocked European nation of just nine million – rarely cause much of a ripple on the international scene. Yet, the potential rise to power of a proudly far-right party in Hitler’s home country deserves special attention. Especially at a time when the hard right is making gains across the globe, and Russia is continuing its war of aggression at the heart of Europe, the FPO’s success in Austria must be analysed closely. We must look at the situation in Austria to understand the failings of Western liberalism that got us here, and use this knowledge to come up with a strategy to prevent further gains by illiberal forces.

First and foremost, it needs to be recognised that an FPO government in Austria would be a significant win for Russia.

When the FPO first got into government with OVP in 2017, it had a “‘friendship agreement’ with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. As interior minister, its current leader, Herbert Kickl, used his powers to order a raid on the country’s own domestic intelligence service, which caused European security services to freeze out their Austrian counterpart.

Kickl’s attack on Austrian intelligence was followed by some of Europe’s most significant spying scandals, which all underlined how the new Austrian government paved the way for Russia to deepen its infiltration of and influence over European politics. In 2019, then-OVP leader and Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache was videotaped entertaining bribes from a purported Russian oligarch, which led to the downfall of the government. That government had also signed Europe’s longest agreement with the Kremlin-owned energy giant Gazprom. The gas offtake deal running until 2040 is now set to be at the core of legal disputes around the end of Russia’s gas deliveries via Ukraine to central Europe at the end of 2024.

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The FPO has admittedly refrained from engaging in the same level of overtly pro-Putin politics since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but the ties between the far-right party and the Kremlin still run deep. The FPO foreign minister between 2017 and 19, Karin Kneissl, who infamously danced with Vladimir Putin at her wedding, is now based at a Kremlin-affiliated think tank in Russia. The party has also called for resuming the Russian gas trade. While there is no easy path for it to do so with Kyiv refusing to renew transfers, once in government, FPO would likely ally with the Slovak and Hungarian governments to put pressure on the Ukrainians to try and get its way.

Austria is also home to one of Europe’s largest natural gas storage hubs. Baumgarten has historically been a key distribution point for Russian gas going west, but also serves Norwegian and other more northerly imports. As Eastern Europe will require more supplies from outside Russia for the foreseeable future, this strategic hub coming under the control of a government friendly to Putin is a significant risk to the continent’s gas markets.

The European Union, while undoubtedly aware of the threat, seems unable to do much to stop the rise of the FPO. Once the centrist negotiations collapsed, and the FPO entered into talks with OVP to form a government, European authorities began to make serious noises about potentially sanctioning Austria – which has been in recession for two years – for not keeping in line with its requirement to keep the national deficit under three percent (this issue was all but ignored when other parties were in talks, despite a lack of consensus between them on how to address the problem). The FPO, however, swiftly responded to the EU’s – admittedly weak – threat to trigger its excessive deficit procedure by announcing an agreement it reached with the OVP to cut 6.3 billion euros ($6.6bn) in spending. Brussels swiftly agreed it would meet the bloc’s deficit requirements.

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On the other hand, the EU has been entirely silent on whether an FPO-led government would align with the bloc’s values despite the FPO manifesto’s call for Austrian “homogeneity” to be achieved through “re-migration”. This stands in stark contrast to the EU’s response to the 2000 entrance of the FPO to an Austrian government as a junior coalition partner for the first time. Back then, Brussels had levied sanctions threats. It subsequently formalised a process for holding member states to account if they violated EU principles or citizens’ rights in response to the FPO’s threat. The process, however, has never been used and appears unlikely to ever be.

With the EU seemingly unable and unwilling to do more to change Austria’s political trajectory, an FPO-led government in the country appears to be an inevitability. Like it is the case elsewhere in Europe, and even the United States, the rise of the far right in Austria is not solely of its own making, but a direct consequence of liberal, centrist failings.

The OVP – supposedly a centre-right party – has found itself playing second fiddle to a pro-Putin, far-right party, not because FPO’s extreme positions are wholeheartedly supported by large segments of the population, but because it failed to gain the trust of voters. The Ibiza affair, and numerous other corruption investigations that followed, turned large segments of its support base against the party. Due to scandals around the handing of lucrative appointments, contracts and gambling licences to political supporters, it failed to shake off the impression that it is a party of corrupt elites.

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Meanwhile, the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) is equally tainted, with its last Chancellor Christian Kern also under investigation over his business dealings. Its third-place finish on 21 percent of the vote last September was its worst-ever performance.

With the two main centrist parties in the country unable to convince voters that they can leave cronyism and corruption behind, the FPO filled the vacuum, portraying itself as a radical opposition to the establishment. It is, of course, nothing of the sort, with scandals of its own dating back to its late-1990s rebirth under charismatic firebrand Jorg Haider. But by swiftly breaking ties with its tainted leaders and standing on an increasingly popular platform of Euroscepticism, autonomy and social conservatism, it managed to finish the last election in the first place. The party even managed to repackage its push for a discriminatory and racist policy like “re-immigration” as support for “a social state for true Austrians who deserve it”, making itself into a mainstream populist force standing against “corrupt” liberal parties.

Far-right forces began their rise elsewhere in Europe, under similar conditions, on the back of years, if not decades of perceived liberal failings and corruption. Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (AfD), which also endorses “re-migration” policies, for example, is posed to come in second in Germany’s February election.

European liberalism is in crisis – in Austria, in Germany, and beyond. And far-right forces walking towards power across the continent are threatening European gas markets, the future of Ukraine as it continues to fight off Russia’s invasion, and the very values and principles Europe was once united around.

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As such, liberalism in Europe is in desperate need of a new message. In this moment of crisis, we can perhaps turn to  Austrian economist Leopold Kohr’s essay “Disunion Now” for inspiration. Published in 1941 as the cost of the failure to unite against the far-right at the ballot box in Austria and Germany was approaching its horrific apogee, Kohr’s essay offers the template for a possible response today.

Kohr saw any potential “Europe of the nations” as doomed to fail unless it were based on autonomous entities as small as city-states. Kohr recognised that the desire for “homogeneity” enabled political cohesion. While he warned of the potential for this to lead to significant disputes, reminding readers that “the Duke of Tyrol declared war on the Margrave of Bavaria for stealing a horse”, he argued that the small state nature would keep the costs isolated, writing that “the adjoining Duchy of Liechtenstein and Archbishopric of Salzburg never learned there had been a war on at all”. Kohr’s vision was based on creating not a “United States of Europe” but adapting Switzerland’s model of cantonal sovereignty, which he argued would create the basis for a more stable federalised Europe.

Kohr’s view is one European liberals must embrace. As the FPO’s rise proves, they have already given up on using the federal powers they gave Brussels to oppose far-right governments. But as they offer no alternative to populist right-wing narratives, liberalism is set to continue losing at the ballot box. Developing a Kohr-ian alternative is the only suitable response to popular demands for more sovereignty and desire for local cohesion, and would in turn lay the basis for a more stable and thus effective Europe.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.