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Introduction
‘Du schaffst das schon!’, a male voice belts, seemingly directly at us. It is a spring afternoon in April 2019 and we are standing in the middle of one of Vienna's largest shopping malls, watching a live pop-rock band consisting of four middle-aged men playing electric guitar, bass, keyboards and drums. The refrain translates as ‘You can do it!’ – but who can ‘do’ it? And what is ‘it’? A large backdrop featuring a familiar colour scheme of blue and the colours of the Austrian flag (red-white-red), together with anti-European slogans clearly identify this as a campaign event hosted by the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria), the country's biggest far-right populist party. At the time of this event, the FPÖ was still part of a coalition government with the conservative ÖVP (Austrian People's Party), but the alliance wouldn't last much longer: within a few weeks, the infamous ‘Ibiza video’ was released, featuring FPÖ vice-chancellor H.C. Strache discussing payoffs and control of the national media with a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch. On this afternoon, however, there was no sign of the coming crisis; the government's popularity ratings were still intact, and the party was drumming up support in advance of the European Parliament elections. ‘You can do it’ – could this be a nod to candidate Harald Vilimsky, the star of the event, or a message of encouragement to potential FPÖ voters? Is it political music after all? Then again, the song seems the most innocent of choices, being ‘just’ a popular love song by the international schlager-pop trio Klubbb3 – could it be simply popular entertainment, without any political intention? But something else is happening here: the song's performance in this space seems to fit the occasion, and the song appears to galvanise parts of the audience, with some participants dancing and singing along. Of all possible cultural forms, the party has chosen popular music for events like these to portray their agenda in public. Are we missing a theoretical concept that can help explain what is going on here? The concepts we are familiar with cannot explain the case at hand.
Scholars have addressed far-right music before, in its underground music incarnations (Shekhovtsov 2013) and in...