By Alison Smales
- Austrian rightists gain in election dominated by refugee crisis
- Austria to wind back emergency measures for Hungary border
Vienna: Behind Vienna's schnitzel and strudel, Mozart and the opera, lurks the legacy of the Nazis who forced Jews to clean the city's footpaths with toothbrushes. In 1988, to much controversy, the city authorities placed Alfred Hrdlicka's "Memorial Against War and Fascism", featuring a sculpture of a Jewish man cleaning the street, right behind the State Opera, lest Austria forget.
Now, to the astonishment of many and the alarm of some, the burning question in Vienna's elegant cafes is: which face will prevail in the city's bellwether elections on October 11.
Austria's far-right Freedom Party is making great strides. Credit: New York Times
Roughly one in four of Austria's 8.7 million residents lives in Vienna. For most of the past century – aside from the Nazi years, 1938-45 – the left has ruled "Red Vienna", long prized for its pioneering public housing and welfare, and its cultural ferment. But against the backdrop of Europe's refugee drama, the far-right Freedom Party is threatening the Social Democrats' hold in what might portend a more general rise in populist, anti-immigrant sentiment across the continent.
Riding a wave of anxiety over the tens of thousands of migrants entering Austria, the Freedom Party finished second, with just over 30 per cent of the vote, in regional elections in northern Austria on Sunday.
With the rise of Austria's rightist party, all eyes are on Vienna's bellwether election on October 11. Credit: New York Times
The Freedom Party's strident anti-Islam message seems to have struck a chord in a city whose palaces speak of the bygone glory of a multi-ethnic European empire and whose public spaces now attest to increasing diversity and a Muslim population of about 12 per cent.
"We don't want an Islamisation of Europe," the party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, told Austria's public broadcaster as he began his campaign to be Vienna's mayor. "We don't want our Christian-Western culture to perish."
In Germany, such sentiments exist on the fringe of politics. In Austria, which never underwent denazification programs after 1945, the Freedom Party has morphed from its roots in groups of former Nazis to a xenophobic message that it blends with concern for the little guy. It is a message the party's charismatic leader, Joerg Haider, rode briefly into national government, and it has thrived beyond his death in a car crash in 2008.
In the last Vienna elections, in 2010, the Freedom Party vaulted to more than 25 per cent of the vote, a gain of more than 10 percentage points. By the middle of this year, opinion polls suggested, the far-right party had pulled almost level with the Social Democrats, who won 44 per cent in 2010. Both now hover just above 30 per cent.
The influx of thousands of refugees has given rise to anti-Islamist sentiment in Austria. Credit: New York Times
The causes are manifold, including unemployment that has risen to more than 10 per cent and dissatisfaction with the longtime mayor, Michael Haupl. His working-class base is eroding; others fault him for failing to end cosy patronage systems that favour the powerful over the poor.
The influx of refugees is expected to have a large impact on the election. Thousands of Viennese have greeted tens of thousands of refugees arriving from Hungary. The national government, which had long flailed on the issue, found a firm voice and strongly criticised Budapest for putting refugees on trains that led them not west to Austria, but to a camp in Hungary. This, said Chancellor Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat, "brings up memories of our continent's darkest period".
Refugees gather at a train station in Vienna.Credit: New York Times
Opponents of the far right hope events such as the greeting of the migrants and the discovery of 71 corpses in a truck abandoned by smugglers have turned the tables on Mr Strache and his hardline positions.
"These are experiences which will not be forgotten so quickly," said Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof, a columnist for the centre-left weekly Profil. Indeed, Austria's tabloids switched from headlines about the chaos brought by refugees to images of warm welcomes, although the arrival of tens of thousands might strain slender resources.
Not everyone is optimistic. "The people are ready to help," said Hans Rauscher, a columnist for the Vienna newspaper Der Standard. "But don't kid yourself. You only have to listen to the gossip in the bars" to know that anti-Muslim feeling runs high".
New York Times