Hot Button Immigration Issue Swings Voters To The Right

That has unsettled some who feel the party, which dropped some of its more polarizing slogans in the campaign, is demonising foreigners.

The FPO, which did not reply to a request for comment, denies this. It says asylum seekers are a drain on state resources, and draws attention to crimes some of them commit.

FPO’s Rhetoric Echoes Pre-World War Two Antisemitism

“The FPO routinely talk about refugees and asylum seekers as rapists and thieves and drug dealers”, said Hedy, a social worker and Austrian citizen who arrived as a refugee from Afghanistan. He declined to give his last name.

“Something very similar happened to the Jews in Vienna before the Second World War”, he said, adding that the FPO, which wants to ban “political Islam”, would embolden xenophobes.

The FPO, whose first leader was a former Nazi lawmaker, has sought to distance itself from its past, and in 2019 helped pass a law allowing foreign descendants of Austrian victims of National Socialism to acquire Austrian citizenship.

This month FPO leader Herbert Kickl called Adolf Hitler the “biggest mass murderer in human history”, as he roundly denounced the Nazi dictator’s legacy in a television debate.

Still, Alon Ishay, head of the Austrian Association of Jewish Students, said he saw some parallels between targeting of Jews in the early Nazi era and attitudes to Muslims now.

“There are rhetorical similarities when you talk about deportation, when you talk about taking people’s citizenship away”, he said, also speaking before Sunday’s election.

FPO-backer Ozay disagreed, saying that Muslims such as himself were free to do as they liked in Austria.

“If there were daily attacks by FPO voters I would understand the fear that things would get even more extreme if Kickl came to power”, he said. “But that’s not how it is. It’s just fear stirred up by the other parties.”

(With input from Reuters)

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Publish date : 2024-09-30 13:09:41

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