“Populist radical-right parties and politicians consider almost everything as a law and order issue—from drugs to immigration,” Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia’s School of Public and International Affairs who focuses on far-right populism and radical-right movements, told me. “The Ministry of the Interior … is the key position for them.”

In February, Kurz and Kickl announced a plan to detain asylum seekers who are deemed potentially dangerous, but have not committed any crimes (a policy they described in German as Sicherungshaft). Kickl, announcing the policy in typical bombastic fashion, said detention would be intended for “someone who has already strapped on an explosive belt in his mind.” Implementing the plan would require a change in the Austrian constitution, and opposition parties have said it violates basic human rights, with some observers likening it to the dystopian sci-fi movie Minority Report.

The idea for Sicherungshaft accompanied a handful of other policies intended to dissuade asylum seekers from coming here. As of this month, for example, refugee-processing centers will be renamed “departure centers,” sending a clear message about how welcome refugees and immigrants are in Austria. The government also introduced a supposedly “voluntary” curfew for asylum seekers awaiting a decision, keeping them in these centers from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and threatening to move them to centers outside metropolitan areas if they don’t comply.

Coverage of and conversation about these policies have been inescapable here in Vienna. They are the main topic that politicians are asked about in primetime television interviews; national newspapers and Vienna tabloids feature stories about them prominently. That is part of the point.

“What the FPÖ really succeeds at is setting the agenda,” says Jakob-Moritz Eberl, a political-communications researcher at the University of Vienna and a member of the Austrian National Election Study, which conducts electoral and voter research. With Kickl specifically, he adds, “It feels like there’s this red line, and he’s pushing it and pushing it and pushing it ... and he’s trying to see how far can he go.”

Read: How to discuss the far right without empowering it

This latest media firestorm was, as Eberl notes, only one of many such controversies from Kickl or his ministry. Beginning with his suggestion in early 2018 that asylum seekers should be “concentrated” in specific places, which he later insisted was not intended to provoke, Kickl has repeatedly said things that raise questions about his and the government’s commitment to the rule of law and that co-opt the political discussion in the process.

In January, he called parts of the European Convention on Human Rights—a legally binding set of rules governing human-rights issues in European countries—“strange,” and said its “many years old” restrictions “prevent us from doing what is necessary.” And last fall, Kickl came under fire over a leaked internal memo instructing police agencies, which are controlled by his ministry, to withhold all but the most basic required information from unfriendly media outlets. The memo also suggested that the ministry should play up sexual crimes by asylum seekers and immigrants and should clearly state the nationality and residence status of perpetrators in press releases.