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AUSTRIA: Far right on the rise

25 April 2016

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"Austria's government was licking its wounds Monday after a historic debacle that saw the opposition anti-immigrant far-right triumph in a presidential ballot two years before the next scheduled general election.

According to preliminary results, Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPOe) came a clear first with 36 percent of the vote, while candidates from the two governing parties failed to even make it into a runoff on May 22.

The result means that for the first time since 1945, Austria will not have a president backed by either Chancellor Werner Faymann's Social Democrats (SPOe) or their centre-right coalition partners the People's Party (OeVP).

"This is the beginning of a new political era," FPOe leader Heinz-Christian Strache said after what constituted the best-ever result at federal level for the former party of the late Joerg Haider, calling it a "historic result"."

See: Austrian government in shock as far-right triumphs (Yahoo! News, link) and Austria’s far-right wins first round of presidential vote (EUobserver, link).

Over the weekend changes to Austria's asylum law were criticised by Council of Europe Commissioner for Human rights, Nils Muižnieks, who said that proposed changes under discussion in Parliament would be out of line with international standards. The interview is online in German here (ORF, link).

The changes would mean that "the government will only accept cases of refugees facing threats to their safety in a neighbouring transit country or whose relatives are already in Austria." See: NGOs slam Austria's asylum law changes (The Local, link)

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