Austria’s far-right hopes to win from populist swing

Freedom Party’s Norbert Hofer sells himself as ‘the perfect son-in-law’

Austria’s worried Jews pray far right will fail to win presidency

Holocaust survivor among those warning against voting for Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party

By Philip Oltermann in Vienna, The Observer
December 03, 2016

As Austrians vote for their next president on Sunday, many will be cheering on Norbert Hofer, the rightwing populist, in the belief that he represents a break with his party’s national socialist roots.

With a boyish smile and six years of experience as a rhetoric coach, Hofer has used the year-long election campaign to present himself as the respectable face of the Freedom party (FPÖ), which in the 1990s still praised the “proper labour policies” of Adolf Hitler.

But not everyone is convinced by Hofer’s transformation. Last week the leader of Austria’s Jewish community took the unprecedented step of endorsing a candidate. Hofer’s opponent, Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green party leader running as an independent, was “not the lesser of two evils” but “the better candidate and a friend of the Jewish community and Israel for many decades”, said Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Communities of Austria (IKG), which represents about 15,000 Jews.

In a Facebook post, Deutsch argued that Austria needed a president who stood up to “anti-Zionist, anti-American, anti-whatsoever” tendencies on the left and the right, “not one who directly or indirectly gives them a boost with polarising comments”.

It was not the first endorsement of historic proportions for Van der Bellen, who had won the original vote in May by a hair’s breadth only to see the result annulled because of irregularities in the counting process.

An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor also recently approached the liberal academic’s camp saying she wanted to make an appeal. In the resulting viral video, “Gertrude” said what worried her most about the Freedom party’s politics was that they brought out “the basest in people – not the decent, but the indecent” – adding “and it’s not the first time something like this has happened”.

Although the Austrian presidency has been seen mainly as a ceremonial post by its previous holders, Hofer has hinted that he would be a more overtly political head of state, saying he would have dismissed the government over its conduct at the height of last year’s refugee crisis, and promising to hold a referendum on EU membership if Brussels took further significant steps towards integration. Sunday’s election comes on the day that Italians vote in a referendum on constitutional reform, another in a series of crucial votes across Europe helping to redraw the political map of the continent.

The Freedom party, led by Hofer’s friend and ally Heinz-Christian Strache, has been consistently leading in the polls indicating the outcome of a general election, and as president Hofer would probably push for the “blues” to take the senior role in a coalition government.

To win in the re-run election, Hofer needs to turn around a 31,000-vote deficit from the May result. Although polls have shown the two candidates neck and neck, many believe that the change in the world’s political climate since the first vote could give the rightwing candidate a boost.

According to a Gallup poll, the majority (53%) of Austria’s population believe Donald Trump’s US presidential success is likely to help Hofer.

Miriam Singer, a bookseller working in the shop at Vienna’s Jewish museum, said she would endorse Van der Bellen because she considered the Freedom party “unelectable”. But Singer conceded that the decision to annul the May result and subsequent triumphs for rightwing populists in Britain and the US could swing the contest in favour of Hofer, “who has managed to sell himself as the perfect son-in-law”.

“It’s going to be very tight, but I hope Van der Bellen can just edge it,” she said.

But a man hurrying down Leopoldsgasse in Vienna’s second district in traditional Hassidic clothing was more ambivalent. “Both candidates are equally bad,” said the man, who declined to give his name. “The Greens are pro-Palestine, which is bad for the Jews, and Hofer’s Freedom party we know all about.” Not voting was not an option for him, he said, so he was considering spoiling his vote in protest.

A rise in immigration from Russia and eastern Europe means that political attitudes in Vienna’s Jewish community are increasingly as complex as those in the rest of the country. The man on Leopoldsgasse said he was not scared of a Hofer presidency as such. “There is a god who protects me, and I just don’t believe Hofer will send me to a concentration camp.”

Anti-Hofer demonstration in Vienna. Anti-immigration, especially of Muslims,  is his main campaigning plank. Photo by Lisi Niesner/EPA

Like Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Freedom party has actively tried to distance itself from its antisemitic past since at least 2010, when it joined a cross-party alliance in the European parliament with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom and Italy’s Northern League. Contacts with openly antisemitic parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik were broken off, a delegate expelled for antisemitic remarks on her website, and ties built up to Israel’s rightwing Likud party – the Israeli government, however, continues to reject all official contacts with the Freedom party.

Andreas Peham, an antisemitism expert at Vienna’s documentary archive for the Austrian resistance, said that the Social Democratic SPO and the Greens had helped create a space for the Freedom party’s realignment by failing for too long to condemn Islamist antisemitism. But Peham questioned whether the Freedom party had convincingly cut ties with its antisemitic past. “That would require a hard break with the rightwing extremist and völkisch elements in the Austrian fraternity movement, and that simply hasn’t happened.”

In 2012 party leader Strache’s Facebook page shared an image showing three men at a dinner table: “the government” was catering to an obese “banking system” while “the people” were left to starve. As the Profil newspaper showed, the posting had literally been copied straight out of the old antisemitic rulebook: only the banker’s hooked nose in the original image had been slightly altered.

Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, L, waits with Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party for the start of a TV debate. Photo by Ronald Zak / AP / Press Association Images

Austria’s Nazi past is rearing its ugly head in the presidential election

Shadia Nasralla and Kirsti Knolle, Business Insider/ Reuters
December 01, 2016

Austria’s most infamous son, Adolf Hitler, is rarely mentioned in his home country. So it came as a shock to many when presidential candidate Alexander Van der Bellen reached into a folder during a recent live TV debate and produced a photo montage including two images of the Fuehrer.

The former Greens leader was complaining at a Facebook post in which a campaign picture of him walking his dog had been juxtaposed with photographs of Hitler and his German shepherd dog at the Nazi leader’s mountain retreat.

“Do you find that in order?” Van der Bellen demanded of his opponent, Norbert Hofer of the right-wing Freedom Party (FPO), naming an FPO official as one of the people who had shared the image online.

Hofer, who in the Nov. 20 debate described the post as “dreadful”, has protested at the daubing of his own campaign posters with swastikas and Hitler-style moustaches.

It was the latest uncomfortable moment in a long, tortuous campaign for Sunday’s election in which Hofer, who despite his anti-immigration platform disputes the label ‘far-right’, says he has drawn encouragement from Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States.

A demonstrator holds a placard showing a picture of US President-elect Donald Trump modified to add a swastika and an Adolf Hitler-style moustache during a protest outside the US Embassy in London. Photo by Ben Stansall/AFP 

Against the background of the migration crisis, the contest will be watched across Europe as a barometer of anti-establishment sentiment and a test of support for populist right-wing politicians, following Britain’s Brexit vote in June and ahead of elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany next year.

Some historians see the use of Hitler’s image to slur both candidates as another sign that Austria, annexed by Germany in the ‘Anschluss’ of 1938, has yet to come to terms with its own Nazi past. That stands in contrast with the sense of collective guilt every German has grown up with since World War Two.

“It’s only since the second half of the 1980s that Austria’s responsibility has become a topic of discussion,” said Hannes Leidinger, a history professor at Vienna University.

Austria long presented itself as the first victim of the Nazis, a narrative initially supported by the Allies even though large parts of Austrian society celebrated the Anschluss and many took on roles in the Nazi war effort and the Holocaust.

The so-called ‘victim myth’ only began to crumble in the 1980s when an international scandal unfolded around Kurt Waldheim, who played down his past as an army intelligence lieutenant attached to Germany military units and became United Nations Secretary-General and president of Austria.

The process is still going on. Until 2013, visitors to an Austrian exhibition in Auschwitz, the Nazis’ most notorious death camp, could see a display reading “Austria – First Victim of National Socialism”. Austria is still updating the exhibit.

At a seminar last week next to picturesque Lake Ossiach near Austria’s border with Slovenia, schoolteachers discussed ways to make Austria’s past more accessible to teenagers.

“I was aggrieved when I saw that Waldheim is not an issue any more for my students. This was so important for my own political socialization, the break with the victim myth. Pupils are simply not interested in this,” said one teacher, 50-year-old Barbara Rossi.

Bernhard Glitschtaler, 29, a nose-pierced author of several books on Nazi crimes in the province of Carinthia, said he tried several times to set up a memorial for victims of the Third Reich in his native valley, but was rebuffed by other locals.

“The families of the victims and the perpetrators still know each other, they work together,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine that state of mind, where the descendants of the victims still feel shame about their ancestors’ deaths, as well as fear of the consequences if their names are mentioned on a monument.”

In this Nov. 22, 2016 photo people walk between election posters of Alexander Van der Bellen, candidate for presidential elections and former head of the Austrian Greens, and Norbert Hofer, from left, candidate for presidential elections of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party, FPOE, in Vienna, Austria. Austrians are choosing Sunday, Dec. 4, 2016 between a moderate and a populist for president – and both candidates are hoping to exploit the Trump effect in the first European Union nation facing such a choice since the U.S election.
Caption by AP, photo by Ronald Zak / AP / Press Association Images

Werner Dreier, the director of the government-financed Nazi-era remembrance platform Erinnern.at, which has offered advice on how to teach the Holocaust since the early 2000s, says the idea that broader Austrian society carried responsibility has made a “hesitant” entry in school books in recent years.

From post-war curricula, which apportioned the blame to military leaders, to the 1990s, when victims’ narratives were the focus, Dreier said the country had come a long way to include the perspective that many civilians helped the Nazis.

Gudrun Blohberger, who heads the pedagogical center at Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp site, says tours for schoolchildren started to be redesigned around 2007 but the lessons are not yet fully anchored in society.

“Specifically that you don’t just talk about the past, but that you carry the insights that you can gain from the past into your own thinking and your actions,” she said. “This is something we should work on very hard.”

Most of those taking part in the seminar said it would be wrong to draw simple comparisons between today’s parties like the FPO, which criticize Islam and immigration, and right-wing populists in the 1930s.

But some called on teachers to carefully tease out some broad parallels between those times and the present, not only in Austria but also in France or the United States.

“This is about recognizing and explaining the overall character of exclusion,” Austrian political scientist and nationalism expert Anton Pelinka said. There was a need, he added, to exert pressure “against hysteria and the construction of fear”.

One 33-year old teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he tried to draw lessons not only from Austria’s Nazi past but also from other periods like the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Such examples could resonate more strongly with his students, many of whose families have migrated to Austria.

“You find everything from Islamic State sympathizers to far-right extremists in my classes,” he said. Such students, he added, are worried about jobs and feel largely excluded from politics.

“I try not to use the Nazi era too much,” he said. “I try to draw abstractions from history: people offering simple enemies, simple answers.”

Austria’s Nazi past is rearing its ugly head in the presidential election