Austrian Jews tells centrists: Don’t work with far-right Freedom Party
VIENNA (Reuters) – The head of Austria’s Jewish community issued a warning to the conservatives and Social Democrats against working with the farright Freedom Party as Sebastian Kurz, heading into coalition talks, spoke of overlap with the far-right group.
Kurz, whose conservatives won elections this month but fell short of a majority at around 32%, said his conservative OVP party has common ground with the Freedom Party on many issues and that he held constructive talks with its leader Heinz-Christian Strache. Kurz was set to meet the country’s president on Monday.
“When the nationalist wolf puts on a blue sheep skin it does not change its nature, only its appearance,” Oskar Deutsch, head of Austria’s main Jewish association, said in an open letter on Facebook to both centrist parties.
Blue is the Freedom Party’s color.
“If OVP and SPO [Social Democrats] believe they can tame the wolf, they are deceiving themselves,” Deutsch said.
Founded by former Nazis six decades ago, the Freedom Party long ago left the political fringes to establish itself as a mainstream party, gaining around a quarter of votes in parliamentary elections on October 15, within a whisker of the Social Democrats.
In 2000, the European Union imposed sanctions on Austria over the Freedom Party’s joining the government. Such a step seems unlikely today, given populist movements in Europe that drove Britain from the EU and put a far-right party into the German Parliament.
Strache has worked for years to sharpen the party’s focus from broadly anti-foreigner to fiercely anti-Islam.
David Lasar, the Freedom Party’s most prominent Jewish official, rejected Deutsch’s criticism in a statement.
“The FPO [Freedom Party] has always been committed to the safety of Austria’s Jewish population, especially at a time that antisemitism has strengthened its base in Europe due to the limitless immigration of Islamist fundamentalists,” he said.
Strache insists that antisemites have no place in today’s Freedom Party, which routinely has to expel members who step over the line. He has visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem and has called antisemitism a crime.
“Symbolic visits to Israel cannot conceal all this. Austria’s Jewish community will not whitewash [this],” Deutsch said, adding that “almost daily” there were racist and antisemitic incidents.
Kurz finished initial talks with the heads of all parliamentary factions over the weekend and was due to meet President Alexander Van der Bellen, likely to tell him with which party he will enter formal coalition talks.
“From my point of view it’s clear that there is conformity in terms of content on many questions with the FPO,” Kurz said on Sunday. Both conservatives and the far Right want to curb immigration, cut back the state and decrease the tax burden on companies.