ECHOES OF THE NAZIS – AND I FEAR WE’LL SEE MORE LIKE HIM
On the surface, norbert Hofer appears every inch the softly spoken family man. Lean, greying, always impeccably turned out, this former aeronautical engineer from middle-class Burgenland looks more like a senior sales executive than a fascist demagogue.
Indeed, were it not for his penchant for posting pictures of himself on social media toting his favourite Glock pistol, you might think him a perfectly ordinary 45-year-old father of four.
But this is a man described by one Austrian politician as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing, a ticking time bomb’. This is a man who once called for Austria to be reunited with Germany, a man who has for years been sending out subtle signals about his fondness for Austria’s history under the Third Reich, and the man who controversially said: ‘Islam has no place in Austria.’
The truth is that norbert Hofer is simply the modern face of nationalist extremism. The real giveaway, oddly enough, is in his favourite flower – the blue cornflower.
Though few people outside Austria would recognise the allusion, the blue cornflower is a symbol of nazi nostalgia. During the mid-1930s, when the nazis were banned in Austria, party members wore blue cornflowers so that they could recognise one another in public.
naturally, Mr Hofer denies that his fondness for the cornflower has anything to do with the nazis. Yet his organisation, the Freedom Party, has never made a secret of its sneaking sympathies for Adolf Hitler, who was born in sleepy Upper Austria in 1889, and did not move to Germany until he was in his mid-twenties.
UNLIKE their German neighbours, the Austrians have never confronted the truth about their crimes in the 1930s and 1940s, preferring to present themselves as victims of the Third Reich, instead of largely willing collaborators. Indeed, at one level the Freedom Party is simply the institutional embodiment of Austria’s refusal to recognise its past. It was founded in 1956 by a former nazi agriculture minister who had served in the SS. And while another former leader Joerg Haider insisted Austrian nazi veterans deserved ‘honour and recognition’, norbert Hofer has been more careful. The plain fact, however, is that for all his public blandness, Mr Hofer is the heir to a political tradition steeped in hatred and violence, trading in nationalism and visceral xenophobia.
As a relatively conservative Catholic nation, the Austrians have never been renowned for their fondness for outsiders.
And as the first Western country in the migration route through the Balkans, with a prosperous economy, affluent population and generous welfare system, it could hardly have been in a worse position. At first, the country bowed to German pressure, throwing open the doors to all-comers. Last year, more than 90,000 people, most of them Muslims from the Middle east and north Africa, applied for asylum in Austria – a country with a population of just under nine million people.
At the end of March, the Austrian government announced plans to close its borders to asylum seekers. A few weeks later, they unveiled a plan to build a massive fence along its southern border.
All this was a gift to norbert Hofer. For months he has been thundering against the pusillanimity of the mainstream elites. He expressed his opposition to ‘forced multiculturalism, globalisation and mass immigration’, and almost daily inveighs against the ‘irresponsible and dangerous’ policies of Brussels and Berlin. every day, he condemns migrants as potential Islamic extremists, rapists and murderers; every day he stokes popular outrage a little further.
The terrifying thing is that where Austria leads, other european countries may follow. Indeed, for other far-Right icons such as Marine Le Pen – who leads polls for next year’s French presidential election – a Hofer triumph would surely prove an inspiration.
The truly disturbing thing about norbert Hofer is not that he reminds us of his country’s nazi past. It is that, in an age when europe’s leaders seem unable to meet the challenge of mass migration, he may well be a symbol of our continent’s troubled future.