Other mainstream European politicians facing threats from a growing far right should take heed: pandering to them doesn’t work. For all the rhetoric of national sovereignty routinely espoused by Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and other populist leaders, Mr. Strache’s fall shows how these supposedly lofty ideas are a cover for opportunism and hypocrisy.

In the leaked video, Mr. Strache is seen drinking champagne and eating sushi at a villa in Ibiza, Spain, where he was meeting with a woman claiming to be the niece of a Russian oligarch with 250 million euros to burn. Among other ideas, he suggests that the woman open a construction company, which he would then ensure received government contracts. As the evening goes on, Mr. Strache comes up with a scheme in which the niece would quietly buy a controlling stake in one of Austria’s most influential newspapers and in return the paper would help “push” the Freedom Party before the 2017 elections.

Mr. Strache’s open desire to seek Russian help in influencing his country’s election, while shocking, should not come as a surprise. The Freedom Party entered into a formal coalition agreement with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in 2016 and some of its members participated as “election observers” in Russia’s fraudulent referendum during the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

And the Freedom Party isn’t unique here. The right-wing League party of Italy signed a similar cooperation agreement with United Russia, and has loudly argued against the sanctions on Moscow which the European Union and the United States imposed in response to Russian aggression against Ukraine . Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, now rebranded as Rassemblement National , received a loan of 9 million euros from a Russian bank in 2014. Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has positioned himself as a leading figure of the European far right, also has strong ties to Russia. Mr. Orban openly admires Vladimir Putin’s “strongman” style of politics; following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, he broke with the rest of the European Union and hosted Mr. Putin in Budapest in 2015.

In short, Mr. Kurz should have known that he was striking a deal with the devil when he formed the coalition with the Freedom Party. He chose to overlook this. While he now tries to distance himself from the scandal-ridden Mr. Strache, claiming that “there were many situations” he found “difficult to swallow, ” his new found indignation rings hollow. What’s worse is that the Freedom Party’s xenophobic and racist ideologies were not enough to turn Mr. Kurz against Mr. Strache. It took Mr. Strache to be caught red-handed selling out his country’s sovereignty to Russia — i ronic for a party that, like the rest of the far right movement, has been banging the drum of national sovereignty in its campaign against Brussels. Let’s hope that with Mr. Strache’s cynicism laid bare, Mr. Kurz has learned his lesson.