VIENNA (Reuters) - Voter frustration over immigration and lacklustre centrist parties has boosted Austria’s far right and increased the odds of it re-entering national government after the next election in 2013.

Austria's far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) leader Heinz-Christian Strache (R) gives a thumbs-up as he celebrates with supporters after provincial elections in Vienna in this October 10, 2010 file photo. Voter frustration over immigration and lacklustre centrist parties has boosted Austria's far right. REUTERS/Herwig Prammer/Files

Across Europe far-right parties have been picking up support with similar platforms as voters worried about livelihoods in a time of austerity and disillusioned with governments seen to be out of touch with ordinary concerns turn to populist parties.

On Oct. 10, Austria’s anti-foreigner Freedom Party won over a quarter of the vote in the Vienna provincial election after calling for a ban on Islamic face veils and pledging to halt mosque-building.

In Austria, where the far right has been on the edge of the political mainstream for years, Freedom was the only party to raise its share of the vote in the affluent capital city, traditionally a centre-left stronghold.

The populist left is traditionally weak in Austria, a nation of 8 million where protest votes tend to go to the far right.

“It is a deep protest, frustration, cynicism against political elites, media elites and economic elites,” political analyst Peter Filzmaier said.

The party gained similar momentum in the late 1990s, tapping into xenophobia and anti-European Union sentiment.

It was able to enter government as a minor coalition partner with the centre-right People’s Party in 2000 after securing 27 percent of the vote, prompting EU states to impose short-lived diplomatic sanctions against Austria.

If Freedom keeps up its current pace it could stand a chance of entering government again with either the People’s Party or the Social Democrats when Austria votes again in 2013, Filzmaier said. “The big question is -- which one of them will do it?”

The Social Democrats and People’s Party, now co-governing reluctantly at the national level, suffered their worst results since World War Two in the 2008 national election and have had mediocre showings in a series of provincial votes since then.

Meanwhile, Freedom has risen. It has increased its share of the vote in five provincial elections, forcing the Social Democrats in Styria and Vienna to look for a coalition partner.

It has used slick slogans oriented towards voters, especially the young, fearful of losing jobs, benefits and cultural standing to foreigners and waged campaigns depicting established parties as wasteful and remote.

There has been a similar swing elsewhere in Europe where the public has become increasingly concerned over the economic and social fallout of austerity and immigration from Muslim states.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam party will have an important shadow role in the new government. In Sweden, a far-right party has entered parliament for the first time.

THE NEW HAIDER?

Freedom’s success in Vienna has been linked to its national leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, once a protege, later a foe of charismatic former party chief Joerg Haider who died in a car crash in 2008. “Is Strache the new Haider?” Austria’s popular News magazine asked last week.

But the combative Strache, a 41-year-old former dental technician, has done little so far to broaden the party’s reach beyond core supporters by engaging centrist parties in a search for common ground that would make it a potential ruling partner.

Haider, who came from the southern Austrian province of Carinthia, appealed more widely to rural and small-town voters outside of Vienna, Austria’s political and economic hub.

“Strache is not Haider,” Richard Luther from Britain’s Keele University said. “Haider used similar themes which he thought correctly would maximise his vote but he also had a capacity to engage in substantive discussions over a broad area of policy.

“Freedom has to some extent gone further down-market in its campaign discourse, which has become cruder,” Luther said.

Under Haider the party tried to improve relations with potential partners before entering government. Even then, Freedom was unable to prove it was more than an opposition party and voters punished it later, analysts said.

“Now (Freedom) is getting back its old energy as an anti-system party,” political analyst Anton Pelinka said.

“But when it entered government (before), it could not deliver what it had promised its voters as an opposition party.”

The two big centrist parties, whose recent coalitions have been hampered by squabbling, in part over how much to bend to anti-immigrant sentiment in order to parry the far right, may be tempted to team up with Freedom to weaken it in the long run.

While this worked before, Austria was left with less stable governments and the Alpine republic’s image was damaged.

It appears unlikely, however, that EU states would isolate Austria if its far right re-entered government. A new Dutch coalition dependent on Wilders has caused no stir in Brussels since Europe’s political landscape has changed.

“I think it unlikely the EU would respond in a manner similar to 2000,” Keele University’s Luther said.