Austrian Chancellor and head of the Austrian People’s Party Karl Nehammer (center) greets supporters during an election rally outside the party headquarters in Vienna on September 27.
After joining forces again in 2017, the People’s Party and Freedom Party governed for 18 months before video from a sting operation caught Vice Chancellor and then-Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache hinting at corruption and influence peddling in what was known as the Ibiza Affair. The People’s Party has governed in coalition with the Greens since 2020.
Marcus How, head of analysis at risk advisory VE Insight, says that while the main appeal of the Freedom Party to certain voters is its hard-line stance on immigration and especially the asylum process, “They’re also more generally the party of protest for voters who are disillusioned with the status quo, with the political establishment, which they see as having betrayed Austrian values, [and] as having disenfranchised them economically.”
They are, How says, “offering a little bit of everything.”
Migrant Fears
“We want to get people out of the country who are here illegally,” says Freedom Party lawmaker Harald Stefan. “[People] who behave criminally here and who do not contribute anything here. That is our ‘remigration’ policy.”
The Austrian Chancellor’s Office said last year that “immigrants are more likely to be both perpetrators as well as victims of crime,” adding the situation on crime “has not changed much over the longer term.”
Parties such as the Greens and Social Democrats argue immigration boosts the economy by filling labor shortages and that the country benefits from the innovation cultural diversity brings.
Meanwhile, more recent immigrants than Kacapur fear getting sucked into a spiral of anti-migrant sentiment the Freedom Party has helped create and whose consequences are difficult to foresee.
“I’ll be very scared, terrified even, if [the Freedom Party] get the votes,” Mohammad, an Iranian immigrant, says at the Brunnen international street market in Vienna where he works. He’s been in Austria for seven years, he tells RFE/RL, and he and other migrants “work full days and pay taxes and don’t want a government coming to power that will make life difficult.”
Written by Andy Heil based on reporting in Vienna by RFE/RL Balkan Service correspondent Andi Moic and multimedia editor Austin Malloy
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Publish date : 2024-09-28 00:21:00
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