Austria’s accidental hard-right leader

Nothing in his early years and even in his first decades as an apparatchik in the fpö seemed to indicate that Mr Kickl would become a serious contender for Austria’s chancellorship at elections this autumn. Born in 1968, he grew up in a working-class family in Carinthia. He was a good student. He liked the Beatles and the cargo pants he bought at the American army shop in Spittal. His grandfather Florian had been a Nazi, but that was the case for many of his generation in Carinthia.