Voters have no time for the flaccid centre

A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the president of Austria. I like a man who keeps a Glock pistol in his jacket pocket, and there is something noble in the cut of his jib. Norbert was thwarted by the voters of Red Vienna and the usual fraudulent postal ballots, most of which will have come from immigrants, as happens time and again in this country. So he lost. Instead the Austrians are saddled with a lunatic, Alexander Van der Bellen, a hand-wringing Green halfwit representing what George Orwell was habituated to call the ‘pansy left’.

Interestingly, both of the two leading candidates for the job of president seem to loathe Austria and wish for it to be abolished. Van der Bellen’s party once distributed posters bearing the witty and profound statement: ‘If you like Austria you must be shit.’ He is an opponent of the nation state per se and would be delighted to see the Austrians ruled from Brussels. But then there’s Norbert, who hankers after the sort of Greater Germany which once commended itself to the fiery but controversial late Austrian politician Adolf Hitler. Norbert has no objection to Austria being ruled from Berlin and even wore one of those little blue cornflowers which Austrian Nazis used to wear. I am not sure what it says about the psychological state of a country’s population when the vast majority vote for two candidates who long for the country to not exist. Fair enough if it were Luxembourg, or Somalia, but Austria is full of likeable, sensible people and has done fairly well for itself since Stalin, rather surprisingly, gave it up.