Three mainstream political parties in Austria said on Thursday that they had reached an agreement to form a new government that excludes the far right, ending five months of roller-coaster negotiations after an election last fall.
It was an improbable comeback for a diverse political coalition that was tripped up by policy infighting when it tried and failed to form a government earlier this year.
And it was a bitter setback for the Freedom Party, which finished first in last year’s elections on the strength of an anti-establishment, anti-immigrant campaign, and was briefly on the cusp of giving Austria its first far-right chancellor in the postwar era. No party came near winning a majority of votes or seats in Parliament.
The likely new chancellor, Christian Stocker, will instead come from the center-right party that has led the nation for most of the last seven years: the People’s Party, which finished second in the September elections, as voters punished it for a string of corruption scandals that mostly occurred years ago.
Mr. Stocker is set to lead the first three-party coalition in an Austrian government, alongside the Austrian Social Democrats and the centrist NEOS party.
“In times of great challenge, Austria has always drawn its strength from the consensus of constructive forces,” Mr. Stocker said at news conference in Vienna on Thursday, where the three parties’ leaders presented a more-than-200-page plan to govern the country for the next four years. The coalition will announce further ministerial appointments on Friday. .
The announcement freezes out the Freedom Party, which failed in its own attempt to form a government earlier this year.
The new government will start on thin ice. The Freedom Party has only grown more popular since last fall, and is now backed by a third of the country.
Polls show Austrians remain frustrated about an economy that has spent the last two years in recession and worried about immigration to the country, particularly from predominantly Muslim countries. The Freedom Party made both a central issue in its last campaign, promising widespread deportations and a ban on political forms of Islam.
In a nod to those issues, the new government said it would toughen its stance on migration, by not allowing asylum seekers to bring their families, while banning head scarves for girls under the age of 18.
“We are honest: these are going to be hard years, two hard years,” said Beate Meinl-Reisinger, the head of NEOS. “We are in a difficult economic situation; we are in a difficult budgetary situation,” she said.
The Freedom Party, founded by former Nazi soldiers in the 1950s, and its leader, Herbert Kickl, had been bidding to become the latest in a wave of hard-right, anti-immigrant parties to take or share power in Europe.
After the Freedom Party won the fall election, other parties refused to work with it. Those parties were given a chance to form a government, but their efforts bogged down on policy issues, like how to mix spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the nation’s budget deficit.
When the mainstream coalition reached an impasse, the most conservative of the parties, the People’s Party, entered negotiations with the Freedom Party. They were prepared to make Mr. Kickl the chancellor.
But those negotiations surprisingly broke down over the question of which party would be able to run the interior ministry, which is responsible for migration and public safety. Both parties insisted they wanted it for themselves.
That gave the mainstream groups one more chance.
Mr. Stocker said that the three parties were able to pick up negotiations where they broke off in January, and all three leaders said they worked late into the nights to be able to present the program, which has elements of each party’s platform. While fixing the budget was a top priority, the Social Democrats lauded a rent freeze for people who are feeling the effects of recession. The NEOS party praised a plan to reduce bureaucracy and cut certain labor costs.
There are many pressures on this coalition, including over the national debt and the other differences among the parties, says Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a political science professor at the University of Vienna.
Still, he said, there’s one major factor holding the coalition together. “The negative incentives are very strong: others would almost certainly benefit from the failure,” he said.
For years, the two main parties of the coalition were the only mainstream options in Austria — power would switch between the two regularly. Those old rivalries might make the coalition more fragile, wrote Peter Filzmaier, an Austrian political analyst, in an email exchange.
“As soon as, contrary to expectations, one of the coalition partners should become more and more popular, old rivalries between the ÖVP and the SPÖ will resurface,” wrote Mr. Filzmaier, referring to the People’s party and the Social Democrats by their German acronyms.
One thing could make the coalition more stable, say experts: the smallest party, NEOS, cannot bring down the government by leaving it, because the two mainstream parties have enough seats in the Austrian Parliament for a majority.
Mr. Stocker, who is expected to lead the country starting Monday, took over his party’s leadership after the former chancellor, Karl Nehammer, resigned from the post in January when the mainstream coalition talks fell apart the first time.
At the time, Mr. Stocker was widely criticized for entering into negotiations with the hard right, especially because he spent months warning Austrians how dangerous the party was.
NEOS party members are expected to approve the agreement in a special vote on Sunday, Ms. Meinl-Reisinger told journalists on Thursday. The government could then be sworn in on Monday.
Mainstream European political parties have struggled in recent years to respond to an erosion in support for establishment parties and the rise of a new group of hard-right leaders who have harnessed voter unrest over immigration, economic stagnation and cultural change.
In Germany, the hard-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, finished second in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, doubling its vote share from 2021 but falling short of its hopes for an even stronger showing. But it is not expected to factor into the next government. All other German parties respect what is known as a national “firewall” against the AfD, refusing to include it in government, as part of a decades-long national effort to avoid a rerun of the Nazi era.
JD Vance, the U.S. vice president, criticized Europeans this month in Munich for that practice, which he said disenfranchises voters concerned about immigration, and urged them to include hard-right parties in government. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said.
Austria has no such firewall. The Freedom Party has repeatedly been included as a junior partner in coalition governments, most recently with the People’s Party. But it has never held the chancellorship.