The rise and fall of Heinz-Christian Strache, Austria’s far-right firebrand

VIENNA — For Heinz-Christian Strache, what started in a luxury villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza is ending in a courtroom.

Just over two years ago, Strache was the second-most powerful politician in Austria, serving as vice chancellor in the country’s right-wing government after helping his far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) reach new electoral heights.

On Tuesday, long after the so-called “Ibiza Affair” cost him his job as vice chancellor and his role as head of the FPÖ — and after a lackluster attempt at a political comeback last fall — he walked into a Vienna courtroom to stand trial for corruption.

The case examines whether Strache helped businessman Walter Grubmüller, a friend and FPÖ donor, by offering to change a law to benefit Grubmüller’s private medical clinic in Vienna. If convicted, Strache could face up to five years in prison.

This week’s trial is the latest act in Strache’s long and at times wild narrative arc in Austrian politics: From a rapid ascent within the FPÖ to an abrupt, scandal-driven fall, to an unsuccessful bid to once again hold public office, to the courtroom.

The case is also the first trial to come out of the Ibiza Affair, which broke in 2019 when German media released a secret recording of Strache on the Spanish resort island. The video, filmed shortly before Austria’s 2017 parliamentary election, shows Strache offering lucrative government contracts in exchange for campaign help from a woman he believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch.

The scandal triggered the collapse of Austria’s then-government, a coalition between Sebastian Kurz’s center-right People’s Party (ÖVP) and the FPÖ. Strache resigned from his post as vice chancellor the day after the video broke and Kurz called for a snap election shortly thereafter; a week later, Kurz himself was ousted by parliament in a vote of no confidence.

(The ÖVP wasn’t out of office for long, though: Kurz’s party made gains a few months later in the snap election and took office again in early 2020, this time without the FPÖ, which sustained heavy losses at the polls.)

So far, the only person arrested in connection with the Ibiza Affair has been Julian Hessenthaler, a private detective responsible for setting up the secret video, who was brought in on drug-related charges. Hessenthaler told the Financial Times that in staging the sting, he wanted to reveal the inherently corrupt nature of Austrian politics: “I wanted to show how easy it would be to involve a leading politician in a corrupt deal … I showed that even with a tiny budget you could compromise a politician who would soon become vice chancellor.”

Still, even two years after it broke, the scandal’s true reach has yet to be seen: Investigators seized phones from Strache and others at the time, which led to additional investigations and other potential charges (as well as the ones for which Strache is standing trial this week).

In the months and years since, the scope of the Ibiza-related corruption investigations has widened to encompass top officials from the ÖVP, including Kurz himself — putting the current government under pressure as well.

“Over the last year, the focus shifted away from [Strache and fellow FPÖ politician Johann Gudenus] over to Sebastian Kurz and … the suspicion that this way of doing politics might not be restricted to the two people who were in Ibiza on that evening,” said Jakob-Moritz Eberl, a researcher in political communication at the University of Vienna and member of the Austrian National Election Study research group.

“But now that Strache is in front of the courts, the focus is definitely back on him.”

From active leader to accused

Strache has been a fixture in Austrian politics for three decades. A trained dental technician who grew up in Vienna, he joined the FPÖ as a city councilman back in the early 1990s. After quickly rising within the party’s ranks, Strache took over as leader in 2005; he spent 14 years serving as head of the FPÖ, making him one of the longest-serving party leaders in modern Austrian history.

In 2007, photos surfaced that appeared to show Strache participating in paramilitary exercises during his youth, and German and Austrian media have also reported he had ties to known neo-Nazis. Strache has denied these allegations, and they didn’t do any significant harm to him politically.

Under Strache, the FPÖ doubled down on the strongly anti-Islam rhetoric that defines it today, declaring in one campaign that “Vienna must not become Istanbul” and running on slogans like Daham statt Islam (roughly, “the homeland over Islam”).

He combined that rhetoric with a persona as the right-wing everyman who told things like they really were, the kind of politician you might want to have a beer with (or, in Strache’s case, a vodka and Red Bull). He often reached voters directly via his Facebook page, which at one point had 800,000 fans — nearly a tenth of Austria’s total population.

But with the Ibiza Affair in 2019, Strache’s ambitions came to a sudden halt. Although many FPÖ voters initially seemed willing to look past Strache’s actions in Ibiza, which he downplayed as a drunken mistake, a wave of other allegations followed in the months afterward. Most damaging among them, at least among the FPÖ party faithful, was the suggestion that he misused hundreds of thousands of euros in party funds to help bankroll his lavish lifestyle, which Strache dismissed as “made-up lies.”

After initially vowing to leave politics for good, Strache launched a comeback bid in last fall’s Vienna city elections. Running on an eponymous list, “Team HC Strache,” the far-right politician sought to gather supporters who believed he’d been unfairly treated. The comeback attempt flopped: Strache’s new party won just 3.3 percent of the vote, far below the 5 percent needed to enter Vienna’s parliament.

Strache, for his part, still vehemently denies the charges in this week’s case. He pleaded not guilty on Tuesday, telling Austrian media beforehand that he’s “very confident” the trial will exonerate him from “false allegations.”

“I know I have never been corrupt in my life,” Strache told the online news portal OE24 before the trial. “I know that I have never been bribed in my life.”

At issue is a law governing public funding for private clinics and hospitals, from which the clinic of his friend Grubmüller stood to benefit. The clinic had been repeatedly denied entry to a network of private hospitals eligible for these funds; according to text message records obtained by investigators, Strache asked Grubmüller specifically which part of the law would need to be amended for his clinic to be “treated fairly.” Once in government, Strache’s FPÖ oversaw an amendment to the law.

Grubmüller reportedly donated €10,000 to the FPÖ in 2017 and invited Strache on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Greek island of Corfu in 2018 in exchange for Strache’s help in tweaking the law, according to prosecutors.

During testimony on Tuesday, both Strache and Grubmüller — who has also been charged in the case — vehemently disputed the notion that there was any corruption or bribery involved. “I expected friendship and nothing else” from Grubmüller, Strache said, noting that he had not taken the trip to Corfu (though he had gone with Grubmüller on a previous trip in 2016).

State attorney Silvia Thaller argued the two men committed a “serious offense” and said it’s clear Grubmüller’s donation was “not for altruistic motives, but in connection with the official business of Heinz-Christian Strache.”

Whether the trial and any others that may come out of the Ibiza-related investigations are truly the end of Strache’s political ambitions remains to be seen. His abysmal performance in the Viennese elections last fall suggests most voters aren’t inclined to give him another chance.

Still, given the small but loyal base of die-hard supporters he’s held onto through it all, it’s difficult to fully rule out some sort of future attempt at another comeback. In fact, if he’s found not guilty or receives a low-level sentence, the trial could ultimately fit into Strache’s long-standing narrative that he’s the real victim in all of this.

“If he’s found not guilty, of course he’ll use that to say all the other allegations against him were … also unfair,” Fabian Schmid, a journalist from Vienna’s Der Standard newspaper, said on the organization’s podcast this week when asked about Strache’s future. “You can say a lot of things about Strache … but I think even his harshest critics would agree that he’s charismatic, that he can get people excited about him. And he still hasn’t lost that.”