The victim's family said he should be spared, and the prosecutor's office that secured his murder conviction 21 years ago expressed doubts about the integrity of the case
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He is abrasive, provocative and has one of the lowest approval ratings among top Austrian politicians but far-right leader Herbert Kickl is still the man to beat in Sunday's parliamentary election, which has at times resembled a referendum on him.
"Kickl here, Kickl there, Kickl everywhere," he joked at a typically rowdy, beer-filled rally in February.
Weeks earlier Chancellor Karl Nehammer framed the election as a choice "between him and me", at a conservative People's Party (OVP) meeting featuring lengthy video footage of Kickl.
"I don't know if I should feel more honoured or stalked!" Kickl said.
Such barbs punctuate Kickl's withering tirades against the unpopular OVP-Greens coalition government, helping make him arguably the most entertaining speaker in parliament.
He and his Freedom Party (FPO) have the wind at their backs. The economy is poised to shrink for a second year running and inflation has remained stuck above the European Union average.
Polls have long shown the FPO, which wants tougher immigration laws, leading a two-horse race with the OVP. The winner will need to form a coalition to govern.
Kickl is loathed by other party leaders, who have vowed not to work under him. He has shown no indication he could emulate Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders, who in March stepped aside so a government could form after his party won in 2023.
The FPO's lead is now wafer thin, and the OVP has stepped up its depictions of Kickl, an ally of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, as an extremist threat to security and democracy.
"It's impossible to form a government with someone who adores conspiracy theories, who describes the WHO, the World Health Organisation, as the next world government and the economic forum in Davos as preparation for global domination," Nehammer said this month.
Nehammer has left the door open to working with the FPO without Kickl. The parties, which overlap on immigration policy and cutting taxes, were in coalition from 2017 until 2019, when Kickl's predecessor Heinz-Christian Strache was shown in a sting video offering to fix state contracts.
Kickl has long been a central figure in the FPO, but he regularly lands at the bottom of an OGM survey for news agency APA of leading politicians' popularity. Only the departing speaker of parliament Wolfgang Sobotka fares worse.
Kickl has cast himself as the future "Volkskanzler", or people's chancellor - a term the Nazis used for Adolf Hitler, though others have also used it.
In 2010, Kickl said he opposed deeming Hitler's Waffen-SS "collectively guilty" for war crimes. The FPO's first leader in 1955 had been a senior SS officer and a Nazi minister.
Kickl and the FPO oppose sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, saying it violates Austria's neutrality.
He has embraced conspiracy theories, claiming the de-worming agent ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, as did former US President Donald Trump.
Yet his campaign against coronavirus restrictions like lockdowns and vaccine mandates helped revive the party's fortunes after it crashed out of government in Austria, which had the highest rate of vaccine holdouts in the EU.
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