One year later, that assessment still looks valid: Kurz remains popular among the Austrian electorate and, were another election to be held today, polls indicate that his ÖVP may even fare better than it did last October. What’s more, the coalition Kurz built with the far-right FPÖ last December is remarkably stable despite a string of scandals implicating top FPÖ ministers and politicians. Somewhat paradoxically, Kurz seems to have figured out how to simultaneously keep the peace with his far-right partners and make it clear that he and his party are completely separate from the more unsavory elements of their rhetoric.

Is this strategy sustainable in the long run? It’s difficult to tell. One recent scandal, over an FPÖ minister’s directions to limit information provided to critical news organizations, helped highlight the inherent contradictions in Kurz’s relationship with the far-right party. Yet some political observers in Vienna say things quickly returned to normal in the Austrian capital and that there’s little sign the ÖVP-FPÖ relationship will break down anytime soon. “This honeymoon period should be over by now, or should be over soon,” Jakob-Moritz Eberl, a researcher in political communication at the University of Vienna and a member of the Austrian National Election Study, told me. “But what’s still surprising to me is that the coalition remains stable in the polls … You could have the exact same election outcome today that you did a year ago.”

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Upon taking over as chancellor of this coalition last December, Kurz worked immediately to streamline the government and the messaging coming out of it. He installed a single government spokesman through whom all media inquiries would theoretically be filtered—a direct response to the frequent public and private infighting of the previous government, a so-called “grand coalition” between the ÖVP and the center-left SPÖ. “The relationship between the coalition parties is based on the common understanding that disputes within the government were rejected and voted out by the people,” Markus Keschmann, the ÖVP’s former director for marketing and campaigning who now works as an outside consultant in Vienna, told me. “The narrative that was successfully put in place is that here are two parties at work who want to successfully bring about the necessary change. You discuss internally and then implement together.”

It helps that, on what is perhaps the dominant political issue in Austria these days—migration—the ÖVP and FPÖ are essentially in lockstep. Over the course of the year, they’ve proposed initiatives and discussed the issue on the European level in a way that makes it clear they are in agreement, far more than the ÖVP was with the SPÖ in the last government. In fact, apart from a debate over a proposed ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, which did briefly cause some tensions between the two earlier this year, there aren’t many issues that divide the coalition partners, policy-wise. “There should be, but there aren’t any,” said Christian Rainer, the editor in chief of the Austrian news magazine Profil. “We don’t really get the feeling that there are any fights between those two parties, not even behind the scenes.”