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Fascism in Austria

01 January 1991

Fascism in Austria
artdoc August=1992

CARF, no 6, January/February 1992
[Campaign Against Racism and Fascism]

Vienna's November 1991 elections, in which the far-right
Freedom Party won 23% of the vote, conclusively confirmed that
Austrians are once again moving to the right on an anti-alien
ticket. The Social Democrats, who have ruled Vienna since
1945, only just managed to keep a majority of seats, and their
erstwhile opponents, the People's Party, made it into third
place - beaten by the Freedom Party. Freedom Party leader Jorg
Haider campaigned openly on an anti-foreigner programme.
Earlier in 1991, Haider who hails from Carinthia, a
traditional Nazi region - was forced to resign as Carinthia's
prime minister after praising Hitler's employment policies.

Some people have tried to explain away the move to the far
Right in Austrian politics, saving that Haider is suave,
attractive and just represents a change. They point out that
the voters have got fed up with the scandals and charges of
corruption which have been levelled at so many of the old
guard politicians.

But these are very superficial interpretations. All the
evidence suggests that there is a genuinely large racist or
fascist electoral seam which the Freedom Party has mined. An
American Jewish Committee poll last October found that one in
five Austrians believe that the rights of Jews should be
restricted and that the country would be better off without
Jews (they number 10,000), and 50% believe Jews were partly to
blame for their own persecution. As the findings were
published, thousands of antifascists were marching to protest
at the desecration of Jewish graves. The media had hardly
reported the incident, which Vienna's mayor dismissed as a
`boyish prank'.