Europe's far right has a new target: newborn babies

The only reason its population is not declining — and its labor force not contracting — is because of immigrants. One in five people now living in Austria originally came from somewhere else.

Even so, the country is getting older. According to the European Commission, the number of working-age people in Austria increased in 2025 solely because lawmakers raised the retirement age for women. And last year was the third in a row in which the country's rate of population growth declined, tumbling to a barely-above-replacement 0.2 percent.

This is the context for the far-right's war on immigration, and the latest target of hate for Austria's Freedom Party: newborn babies. As Vienna's center-left newspaper Der Standard reported, FPÖ lawmakers — U.S. President Donald Trump's closest allies in the country — are demanding to know the nationality of anyone receiving state support to cover some of the costs of in vitro fertilization. Party leader Herbert Kickl declared it a "scandal" that someone who obtained asylum in Austria could receive help to start a family. FPÖ General Secretary Michael Schnedlitz dubbed it "migration from the test tube."

Subverting — and celebrating — the fascist aesthetic

In Austria, activists co-opted fascist imagery to promote a message of inclusion. Would that work in America?

The RedoubtCharles R. Davis

In all of Austria, roughly 12,500 women received IVF treatment in 2024. The cost of state support overall, then, is a fiscal drop in the bucket; the bill for helping some immigrants create life is objectively inconsequential.

But as one FPÖ politician argued, even 100 babies born to non-native parents would be simply unacceptable, amounting to "two new school classes" — not just one — of children with contaminated foreign blood.

For those preaching a return to a romanticized past of national greatness via racial exclusion, future Austrians ought to be as white as the Alps (at least before climate change). It does not matter that immigrants creating families would produce German-speaking children who would grow up learning Austrian history, including its past as the seat of a multicultural empire; the original sin is ever being born.

Incapable of producing more children themself, for reasons that may have to do with their outlook on life and the obstacle it poses to finding a consensual mate, the reactionary turns to anger at those who can. Extremists like Martin Sellner, the Austrian proponent of ethnic cleansing, preach conspiracy — the "Great Replacement," or the notion that there is something nefarious about immigrants building lives in countries that need them.

What the fascist ideologue seeks is not a return to past glory — not really — but to rule over a barren fiefdom. Theirs is an impoverished vision, defined only by what they oppose. And in Austria, it has been tried and failed before, as the Green Party's Meri Disoski told Der Standard.

"Such patterns of thought are reminiscent of the darkest chapters of our past," she observed.

The product of 20th-century fascism was millions of dead. When those preaching the 21st-century variety openly say that they oppose life, it is one instance where you should believe them.