section_path: National variants/Europe/Austria
section_name: Austria
paragraph_text: Austria
  
  Austrian conservatism originated with Prince Klemens von Metternich, who was the architect behind the monarchist and imperialist Conservative Order that was enacted at the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The goal was to establish a European balance of power that could guarantee peace and suppress republican and nationalist movements. During its existence, the Austrian Empire was the third most populous monarchy in Europe after the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom. Following its defeat in the Austro-Prussian War, it transformed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was the most diverse state in Europe with twelve nationalities living under a unifying monarch. The Empire was fragmented in the aftermath of World War I, ushering in the democratic First Austrian Republic.
  
  The Austrian Civil War in 1934 saw a series of skirmishes between the right-wing government and socialist forces. When the insurgents were defeated, the government declared martial law and held mass trials, forcing leading socialist politicians, such as Otto Bauer, into exile. The conservatives banned the Social Democratic Party and replaced parliamentary democracy with a corporatist and clerical constitution. The Patriotic Front, into which the paramilitary Heimwehr and the Christian Social Party were merged, became the only legal political party in the resulting authoritarian regime, the Federal State of Austria.
  
  While having close ties to Fascist Italy, which was still a monarchy as well as a fellow Catholic nation, Austrian conservatives harboured strong anti-Prussian and anti-Nazi sentiment. Austria's most prominent conservative intellectual, the Catholic aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, published several books in which he interpreted Nazism as a leftist, ochlocratic, and demagogic ideology opposed to the traditional rightist ideals of aristocracy, monarchy, and Christianity. Austria's dictator Engelbert Dollfuss saw Nazism as another form of totalitarian communism, and he saw Adolf Hitler as the German version of Joseph Stalin. The conservatives banned the Austrian Nazi Party and arrested many of its activists, causing tens of thousands of Nazi sympathisers to flee to Nazi Germany in order to avoid persecution. A few months later, Nazi forces initiated the July Putsch and managed to assassinate Chancellor Dollfuss in an attempt to overthrow the conservative government. In response, Benito Mussolini mobilised a part of the Italian army on the Austrian border and threatened Hitler with war in the event of a German invasion of Austria. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss, conservative groups were suppressed: members of the Austrian nobility and the Catholic clergy were arrested and their properties were confiscated. Otto von Hapsburg, the last Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, was a fervent anti-Nazist, for which reason the Nazi regime ordered that he was to be executed immediately if caught.
  
  Following World War II and the return to democracy, Austrian conservatives and socialists alike abandoned their extremism, believing in political compromise and seeking consensus in the middle. The conservatives formed the Austrian People's Party, which has been the major conservative party in Austria ever since. In contemporary politics, the party was led by Sebastian Kurz, whom the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung nicknamed the "young Metternich ".