Far-Right will control Austrian army in coalition deal
AUSTRIA: A far-Right party will be sworn in as a coalition partner in Austria today with a mission to curb migration into Europe as the new government faces accusations of racism and xenophobia.
The Freedom Party (FPO), led by Heinz-Christian Strache, has been given control of the foreign, interior and defence ministries in a reshuffle of top jobs by Sebastian Kurz, the new chancellor, whose conservatives won the election in October.
This will hand oversight of the army, police and intelligence services to the FPO, which signed a co-operation agreement last year with President Putin’s United Russia party and wants to lift European Union sanctions imposed on Moscow after the annexation of Crimea.
At 31 Kurz becomes the youngest elected leader in the world but he is already a seasoned politician, having been foreign minister since he was 27.
Despite the strong Euroscepticism of the Freedom Party, Kurz vowed to run a pro-EU administration and took control of European matters into his own office. His brand of pro-EU politics is focused on limiting the powers of Brussels, however, and he will be a barrier to the greater integration planned by President Macron of France.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, who lost the presidential run-off in May, called the FPO’s success in Austria ‘‘excellent news for Europe’’.
The new Austrian coalition was strongly criticised by Turkey yesterday for ruling out the prospect of it joining the EU. Its 180-page government programme also vowed to cut payments to refugees, defend Austria’s borders and end illegal immigration.
The Freedom Party was founded in 1956 by former Nazi officers and was led from 1986 to 2000 by Jorg Haider, who was notorious for praising Adolf Hitler’s ‘‘proper employment policies’’. Strache was detained by police in his youth at a torch-lit neo-Nazi demonstration, which he later dismissed as ‘‘stupid and naive’’.
The last time the FPO joined an Austrian government, in 2000, the EU swiftly brought in diplomatic sanctions, although it dropped them within a year after they proved to be counterproductive. The FPO eventually crashed out of the government in 2005 after a split in the party.
Omer Celik, the Turkish EU affairs minister, tweeted that Kurz’s administration had ‘‘started attacking fundamental democratic values without delay’’. He accused Kurz of being ‘‘even more radical than the far Right’’ and branded the EU as weak for not condemning the ‘‘racist approaches’’ in the Austrian government programme.
Kurz’s People’s Party (OVP) came top in an election dominated by immigration and integration after an influx of asylum seekers over the past two years. The Freedom Party came a close third behind the Social Democrats on 26 per cent of the vote.
Kurz and Strache, 48, presented their coalition agreement on Sunday at the Kahlenberg, a hill on the outskirts of the capital famed as the site of the 1683 Battle of Vienna, which ended a siege of the city by Ottoman Turks.
– The Times