Europe's Next Test Case
A Journey Down Austria's Path to the
Right
With a right-wing extremist party in government again, a major
experiment is currently taking place in Austria -- one that may test the
endurance of democracy in Western Europe. A visit to a country that appears
unable to come to terms with its own history as it lurches to the right.
By Ullrich Fichtner
Armin Smailovic / DER SPIEGEL
July 09, 2018 01:01 PM
If you enter Austria from the west, near Bregenz on Lake
Constance, with a little luck and the right meteorological conditions, images
of stunning beauty will unfold between the water and the mountains. The peaks
divide the weather, with rain fronts and clear skies competing for space, or
dense fog spreading across the ground like mystical, glowing steam. When night
falls further back in the High Alps in this geological spectacle called
Austria, the peaks and summits soon start resembling the heads of animals, like
monstrous bodies whose flanks are dotted with villages resembling Christmas ornaments.
The geographic drama mellows to the east, flowing into more friendly hills
until, finally, behind Graz, behind Vienna, in Burgenland, the Pannonian Basin
is reached, and you come to the end of today's Austria. It's a beautiful
country. That much must be said ... before saying anything else.
Everything else concerns the strange paths along which the
country, its society and its political classes have been traveling for quite
some time -- perhaps for a hundred years, perhaps even longer, but at the very
least since this winter, since a new government has moved into its offices in
Vienna's magnificent palaces. The country is now governed by a coalition that
likes to refer to itself "turquoise-blue," a reference to the two
parties' political colors -- turquoise represents the party of Chancellor
Sebastian Kurz and blue the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). But going by what
we've learned about political color affiliations from history, it would be more
accurate to describe it as a "black-brown" coalition. The black, of
course, is the traditional color associated with conservatives. And the brown
is the color of right-wing extremists and the Nazis.
The doubts began on the very first day of the chancellorship
of Kurz, a 31-year-old native son of Vienna who comes from an upper
middle-class family and has the gentle face of an apostle. Kurz has a few
semesters of law school under his belt to go with a successful career as a
politician with the mainstream, Christian-conservative Austrian People's Party
(ÖVP). He had the option of forming a coalition government together with the
Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) after October's election. It still
would have allowed him to become chancellor and would have produced the kind of
coalition government that Austria has had for decades. But he ultimately
decided against an alliance with moderate leftists and left-wing liberals and
instead preferred to form a partnership with the hard right and right-wing
extremists from the so-called Freedom Party, which is known throughout Europe
for its penchant for radical right-wing populism. Since then, a hail of slurs
and apersions has spread across Austria, a constant flirtation with the vulgar
and primitive, a sketchy interplay of words, actions and symbols.
On the very first day, when the new government first
presented itself to the public just one week before Christmas, a photo shoot of
the new cabinet took place at the gates of Vienna, located on Kahlenberg hill.
As every child in Austria is taught, it is here where the 1683 Siege of Vienna
by the Turks was driven back. It is here, according to popular imagination,
that the Christian West was saved.
To understand this political PR campaign as a German, you
would have to imagine Angela Merkel calling the media to Leipzig to present her
cabinet at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, the site where Napoleon's
retreat from Germany was sealed. And when asked the obvious question about the
meaning of this particular choice of location, the chancellor would reply:
Meaning? What do you mean? I have no idea what you're getting on about.
And that's precisely how her counterpart in Vienna replied
when he was asked what the appearance at Kahlenberg meant. Kurz just made his
apostle face and said: the place? It had no symbolic meaning -- no, his team
chose the location, and he had nothing to do with it.
That's the way things work in Austria these days. No one has
any idea what is actually meant by things. Whether anything is meant at all
and, if so, how it is meant. Are, for example, the far-right fraternities in
the country, those so-called Burschenschaften that form such an important wing
of the FPÖ party, just too lazy to delete the Nazi songs still slumbering in
their songbooks? Or do they still sing them here and there out of conviction?
How does Austrian society live with the suspicion that there are young people
in its ranks who study law or medicine during the day and celebrate the gassing
of the Jews with beer in the evening, as these fraternities have been known to
do? How can a country stand the thought that people like that might now even be
sitting in parliament, where 20 out of 51 members of the FPÖ belong to one of
the country's Burschenschaften, and often one that leans strongly to the right?
It may sound a little over the top to say that Austria is
teetering on the edge, a little hysterical to claim that the country and its
capital city of Vienna are politically on the brink. But it's not totally wrong
to do so either. It is certainly wrong to keep conjuring up a relapse into the
1930s, as some opponents of the new government are wont to do. But questions
about whether Austria remains and still wants to be an open-minded, modern
democracy are justified. Or whether authoritarian thinking will continue to
infiltrate society. And the extent to which everyday Austrian life, in freedom
and prosperity, is being spoiled by a willful, reactionary spirit.
We don't have the complete picture yet, but some remarkable
puzzle pieces are already coming together. Austrian Vice Chancellor
Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of the FPÖ, is a man whose "youthful
sins" include spending copious leisure-time hours with criminal neo-Nazis.
A man who, despite having long since reached adulthood, sends out
narrow-minded, malicious, xenophobic postings and fake news to millions of
people via Facebook every day, complete with fake caricatures, unsubstantiated
allegations, deliberate deceptions and broadsides against lawyers and
journalists alike.
Another FPÖ member, Herbert Kickl, was handed the Interior
Ministry portfolio, a man who served as secretary-general of the party from
2005 to 2018 and is responsible for election advertising that included slogans
like "Keep the West in Christian hands" or, even less sophisticated,
"Islamization must be stopped."
As a minister, this man is now ordering raids on government
agencies, claiming that "a restrictive asylum policy is a legitimate
concern of the population," and insisting that an
"infrastructure" must be created in Austria, "where we can
succeed in keeping those who enter an asylum process appropriately concentrated
in one place." Concentration camps? Not in so many words, perhaps. But was
that what he really meant? Was that the message he was trying to send to the
electorate?
Europe's Latest Test Case
Like Hungary, Italy and Great Britain before it, Austria is
now another test case for Europe. Sitting as it did between NATO and the
Eastern Bloc, Austria always insisted on its neutrality during the Cold War,
but there was never a doubt that it belonged to the West, both culturally and
politically. But that certainty is now being cast into doubt. It seems that
many Austrians have grown so tired of the arduous negotiation of compromises
that they are instead turning to authoritarian models. That they no longer want
to argue rationally, but emotionally. What we are talking about here is the
question of whether Germany's neighbor is, bit by bit, bidding farewell to the
democratic way of life. Whether its society still wants pluralism and if it is
capable of enduring the thousand varieties of multiculturalism and the
processes of migration despite all the difficulties they present.
The best way to approach answers to such questions is to
visit this beautiful country, its mountains, its lakes and its rivers. On May
4, 1991, a young politician named Jörg Haider threw himself into the gorge
beneath the Jauntal Bridge in Carinthia on a bungee cord to send the message
that new times were dawning. On can visit Persmanhof in the Karawanks, a place
where partisans once hid until SS men committed one of the last war crimes of
World War II, and where it becomes apparent that no country can ever really
escape its history.
More than 30 extensive interviews were conducted during the
reporting of this story -- with fraternity members and book authors, with
journalists and FPÖ politicians, with students, cabaret artists, diplomats,
historians, engaged citizens and a village mayor at the foot of Grossglockner
Mountain in the Alps.
The journey took the reporter through Innsbruck, Villach and
Graz, up to Salzburg and, of course, over to Vienna, where a third of all
Austrians live and where intellectuals still hold court in the city's famous
coffee houses. It is a city where every alley has history to tell, where
Heroes' Square alone could provide material for a thousand novels, where
Empress Elisabeth "Sisi" of Austria lives on forever, where the
Lipizzaner do their dance and where the colossal labyrinth of the imperial
Hofburg palace all provide hints of how great the Habsburg Empire was until
1918.
Vienna's Café Engländer, with its red benches and black
chairs, is where Robert Misik likes to take his lunch. He always orders "Menu
1" with dessert without so much as glancing at the menu. He's in a hurry
on this day because he has promised his mother he would visit. Misik is the
Viennese edition of the dedicated intellectual, a leftist, but casual at the
same time, he wears a leather jacket and has a receding headline and a strongly
honed sense of humor, which makes a lot of things easier. On the day of our
meeting, "Menu 1" is wafer-thin beef schnitzel, breaded and fried --
and very Viennese.
Misik is the author of numerous books and he has also
written or signed numerous political appeals. He's always there when the need
arises to organize protests against the right. He's hard working and stands up
for what he believes in, including on the internet. He fills his days doing
video columns, writing editorials and conducting radio interviews. His latest
book, a witty collection of short essays entitled "Love in the Times of
Capitalism," has just been published.
To Misik, Kurz's new government is the product of what he
describes as the "the end of a 30-year process of gradual deadening."
It's a process that began back in the 1980s, he explains, when the FPÖ began
shedding its many skins and began its rise under Jörg Haider. This path led to
the first national coalition government between ÖVP and FPÖ in 2000. The
chancellor at the time was Wolfgang Schüssel, a man who wore a bow tie and who,
practically on his own, destroyed the last remnants of credibility that the
country's politics still had.
Character Flaw
The European Union imposed sanctions against Austria for
seven months at the time, a sign it was united against right-wing extremism. It
is an act that would be inconceivable today. But it's also likely that the
well-meaning move actually strengthened extremist and anti-EU tendencies in
Austria. Many Austrians, after all, pride themselves on their stubbornness.
They have always been easy to reach with "we've had enough"-type
slogans -- of the kind the FPÖ has masterfully applied in all policy areas.
Indeed, the party's opponents are not particularly surprised that the
right-wing populists were once again able to ride such slogans to a spot in the
government coalition. "We have progressed," says Robert Misik,
"from the unthinkable to the unspeakable to the unbearable." That is
very well stated, even if you have to read it twice.
"We're masters at looking the other away, of denial and
suppression," says Anneliese Rohrer, sitting in the conservatory of the
distinguished Café Landtmann on Vienna's famous Ringstrasse, where the colossal
Burgtheater stands directly in front of the high windows. Rohrer, who will turn
74 this year, has a successful career behind her as a newspaper journalist, and
the courageous woman continues writing today. Her opinion on the current state
of politics in the country is expressed in the name of one of her books:
"Character Flaw: The Austrians and Their Politicians." In light of
the Kurz government, Rohrer describes her attitude toward life these days as
"queasy and helpless." The fact that 70 years after World War II we
have to worry about the state of democracy again, she says, "is
incomprehensible."
On the day of our meeting, the new government has only been
in office for 40 or 50 days, an ice-cold, dark day in February. The government
has just announced that subsidies will be cut for the integration of refugees,
for German-learning courses and other programs. Rohrer says the move is
"pure malice" given how it will intentionally marginalize people.
Rohrer says everything is worse this time around than in
2000. First, because Haider couldn't stand the fraternities. And, second,
because this time the FPÖ has been targeting government institutions. The
Constitutional Court, university boards, police forces and institutions are to
be "re-colored" -- a reorganization, she says, that should be
concerning to everyone.
Of course, parties have always sought to stack government
posts with their own people, but the Freedom Party of Austria is in a league of
its own. The party has signed a cooperation agreement with Vladimir Putin's
United Russia and maintains cordial relations with many right-wing extremist
parties across Europe, including Vlaams Belang in Belgium and Front National in
France. The week before last, cheerful selfies of FPÖ Vice Chancellor Strache
together with Italian racist Matteo Salvini went viral.
Hands on Many Levers
The FPÖ is a party which makes no secret of its admiration
for Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. It is a party that has always been in
tune with the white nationalist Identitarian Movement, which in Germany has
attracted the scrutiny of Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which is
responsible for monitoring all forms of extremism. It is this party has its
hands on many levers in Austria today.
Members of the FPÖ are now responsible for the police and
intelligence apparatuses, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and
Counterterrorism (BVT), which monitors extremists in the country, the army, the
diplomatic service and the social welfare authorities. Perhaps Chancellor Kurz
wasn't paying very close attention when his "turquoise-blue"
coalition took shape, but the FPÖ now not only holds the office of vice
chancellor, but also the Interior, Foreign, Defense, Transport and Labor and
Social Affairs ministries, all of them key government portfolios. This raises
some extremely basic questions: How do government officials in Vienna see
international cooperation in the future? Which foreign intelligence service,
which police, which judicial authority, which military apparatus would exchange
knowledge and data with a government that includes friends of Putin, Orbán
admirers and Salvini fans?
One could attempt to employ charm to gloss over everything,
as Austrian government spokesman Peter Launsky-Tieffenthal does. He is
constantly firing off greetings in every direction in flowing, dance-like moves
so that nobody can possibly feel ignored.
On one early spring morning, Launsky-Tieffenthal is
strutting through the richly stuccoed halls of the Chancellery in Vienna.
Chancellor Kurz has invited reporters to a background interview on the
forthcoming Austrian Presidency of the European Council, the powerful EU body
representing the member states. Kurz's chief of staff will be present, as will
the foreign minister. In greeting, Launsky-Tieffenthal notes that we had never
met before. "Glad to have you here," he says.
We stride up a massive staircase once used by legendary
Austrian Empire diplomat Prince von Metternich in the 19th century. Located
behind the Stone Hall is the Congress Hall, actually named after the Congress
of Vienna, which once sealed the end of the Napoleonic era here. There are five
heavy chandeliers in the hall, under which a TV-friendly podium has been set up
for Kurz and his colleagues, all in white.
The background discussion, it turns out, is actually a press
conference -- the room is full, Launsky-Tieffenthal greets the guests and they
drink cappuccinos out of dainty cups served by waitresses. A few hours later,
Launsky-Tieffenthal will reply by text message to a casual question that came
up during our chat about the color of the broad, flesh-colored frieze that
skirts the base of the ceiling around the entire hall. "Pompeii red,"
the text reads.
An Obsession with Migrants
The chancellor takes the stage right on time and he seems
well rested standing between the Austrian and European flags flanking the
podium. You don't get the slightest sense that he feels at all burdened by the
high office he now occupies. He speaks about Europe, or, to be more specific,
about "the fight against illegal migration." In Austria, after all,
the two issues are currently one and the same.
Whenever Kurz raises his gentle voice, words begin tumbling
out, the meaning of which could have been conveyed in a much more concise
manner. And he never forgets to emphasize his own achievements. "You'll
remember," he says, "that I was one of the first ..." Or:
"Even as foreign minister, I noted to my European counterparts early on
that ..."
Kurz never misses the opportunity to incorporate foreigners,
and the problems he associates with them, into what he says. And he exploits
any opportunity to share his own very streamlined version of history -- namely:
"as you are certainly aware," he shut down the Balkan Route
practically on his own.
Thanks in part to Kurz's performances, Austria's societal
debate is also obsessed with migrants and all the trouble people have with
them. And it's not just about refugees, but also foreigners of all stripes, including
Germans, Slovenes and Hungarians. Somehow, there are always too many of them,
allegedly taking up all the public housing, filling up the universities and
snapping up all the tickets to the Vienna State Opera so that people born in
the country can't get them. During the press conference, Chancellor Kurz says a
"continuous consideration of the migration problem" is needed, and
that this is largely Austria's contribution to Europe's future. Of course, much
more will be heard from the country about that subject now that Austria has
assumed the helm of the EU Council Presidency for the next six months.
"Kurz is a PR product," says Florian Klenk,
sitting inside the city's Zum Schwarzen Kameel restaurant, where a charismatic
head waiter named Maître Gensbichler keeps an eye on bourgeois society between
generously filled sandwiches and delightful apricot pancakes. Klenk is
editor-in-chief of the Viennese city magazine Falter, which has established
itself as the central organ of civil resistance in the growing cacophony of
Austrian politics. The magazine's circulation is increasing, not just in
Vienna.
Klenk, born in 1973, holds a doctorate in law and is famous
in Austria as an investigative journalist. In the course of his reporting, he
regularly uncovers dirt on the police, the judiciary and various other
institutions. He recently brought to light a shocking scandal about Austrian
peacekeeping troops. He's a man who knows his way around the country, even its
less savory corners.
Klenk is, on the one hand, quite alarmed. Alarmed that the
FPÖ is increasingly and brazenly encroaching on the democratic sphere and that
things have become so debased that the interior minister can hire a writer from
the extremist fake news platform Unzensuriert.at (uncensored.at) as his
spokesman, without any consequences. He also believes that Kurz is the first
Austrian chancellor to be a "right-wing populist with a friendly
face," to emerge on the European political stage, one who could be in
office for a long time to come.
But on the other hand, Klenk says, this government, or at
least the coalition with the FPÖ, will fail because the ÖVP is putting pressure
on its junior partner to enact policies that go against the interests of
populists' own base. For example, legislation is being drafted that would go
against the interests of the poor and vulnerable in society, against the
sacrosanct social housing and workers' rights. "That will kill the FPÖ in
the long term," Klenk says.
Later that evening, he starts to philosophize about his
country. He's sitting in Zum Schwarzen Kameel, a large place, half cafe, half
restaurant and in a pseudo art nouveau style with lots of paneled, mirrored
niches. "It's difficult to make judgements about Austria," he says,
"Because you never know where you are. It's like these niches, with the
mirrors. When you go by, you see it ahead in the mirror, whereas in fact it's
behind you. And if you come from the right, you see it first in the mirror from
the left. It's like that here. That's how things work."
Part 2: Learning How Austria Ticks
July 09, 2018 01:01
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Austria is one of the last remaining paradises for print
journalism. There are papers across the country -- from the serious national
newspapers like Der Standard and Die Presse, to the good regional publications
and the impressive newsweeklies such as Profil and then the Kronen Zeitung, a
mass-circulation daily, that is essential reading to understand how the nation
ticks.
The newspaper has a print run of 700,000 and reaches 3
million readers a day in a country of 8.8 million inhabitants. To reach that
kind of audience, a German newspaper would have to have a print run of 7
million and a readership of 30 million. That's something that even Bild, the
biggest-selling paper in Germany, couldn't dream of attaining.
The "Krone" as it's called, is pure tabloid, with
a rapid stream of political reports, folksy stories, family dramas, crime,
sports, attacks on politicians, there's a solid level of xenophobia, it looks
down on minorities, gets riled up over lax judges and allows bishops to write
columns in which they spread the gospel to the people. On the positive side, a
democracy that can withstand a paper like the Kronen Zeitung for a long time without
major damage can be considered relatively stable. At least on the one hand.
On the other, though, the Krone shares a lot of the blame
for the fact that there is little progress in the liberalization of Austrian
society, argues Doron Rabinovici. The writer is sitting in Café Korb, where the
walls are painted the color of egg yolks. He says the newspaper is one of the
reasons that, in contrast to Germany, "there's no firewall against
right-wing extremism." The paper is constantly flirting with racism and
shows open disdain for democracy. "The terms are constantly being
blurred," Rabinovici says, "and that starts with the fact that they
are always being described as right-wing populists when they are in fact
right-wing extremist populists."
Rabinovici is a fixture in the contemporary German-language
literary world, a permanent part of Vienna's intellectual life. Five years ago,
he brought his "The Last Witnesses" to the Burg Theater -- a shocking
and critically acclaimed play that included the participation of witnesses to
the Nazi pogroms of 1938. Rabinovici also organized the mass protests at
Heldenplatz against the first ÖVP/FPÖ coalition in 2000. Around 250,000 people
responded to his appeal: "We are Europe -- no to the racist coalition."
In January, he once again tried to organize a similar rally. This time, only
70,000 people turned up.
Rabinovici, a relatively short man with a sharp mind, is
bitterly disappointed with the political developments of recent years. He says
the current government is more dangerous than that of 2000. Back then, Austria
was the exception in Europe, but today its authoritarian tendencies are part of
the mainstream. Democracy is in retreat, even in its previous bastions in
Europe and America, "and none of us know how we are going to get out of
this."
Falling Back
Rabinovici sees three crises overlapping that are also grist
to the mill of the extremists, in Austria and beyond. First, it's no longer
possible to finance the welfare state as we once knew it due to the shifts
being caused by globalization. Second, supranational organizations, such as the
European Union, haven't succeeded in credibly replacing the nation-state. And
third, the nation-states are under such pressure that they are falling back to
protectionist ideas, hot on the heels of the reactionaries, nationalist and
racists.
This, he says, is the situation Austria finds itself in. The
new government is "taking steps every day against foreigners," and
spreading anti-Semitic catch-phrases. A love of the "heimat," that
uniquely German concept that combines home, hearth and a deep suspicion of the
other, is becoming the patriotic duty of every citizen, and every conflict is
presented as us against them. Last year on Twitter, a local politician branded
the writer, who moved to Vienna from Tel Aviv as a child, as "Rabinovici
the well-poisoner." That's how things are in today's Austria.
Unbelievable things are written and said on social media, on
TV or in newspapers, without causing much of a debate. When, for example, a
former bishop from Salzburg says that same-sex relationships cannot be blessed
by the church because, after all, "it isn't possible to bless a bordello,
a concentration camp or a weapon either," the story merits but a single
column in the back pages. When the FPÖ general-secretary suggests on Twitter
that a critical academic "get psychiatric help" to cure himself of
his "ignorant hogwash," it no longer triggers a scandal.
The issue of women wearing headscarves, on the other hand,
is given prominent standing in the media, as if people in Austria didn't have
any other problems that needed addressing. The issue of stiffening penalties
again sex crime offenders is never put to rest. And the result is that the
public culture of debate continues to erode, and people only briefly perk their
ears when some local politician in the mountains leans on the right-wing
lexicon when fulminating against Muslims.
That someone is Peter Suntinger, who has been mayor of the
small town of Grosskirchheim for 21 years, far away from Vienna. "We are a
strictly Catholic community. We won't accept any Muslims, they simply don't fit
in."
Grosskirchheim is in the state of Carinthia, located on the
high Alpine road that accesses the country's highest mountain, the Grossglockner.
The highest section of the village lies at an altitude of 1,500 meters (4,920
feet) and is covered in snow into May in some years.
Dressed in traditional Austrian livery, Mayor Suntinger
lists out his problems over a cup of coffee. The biggest one is the fact that
Grosskirchheim is shrinking. It's a problem for the remaining population, for
the town's economic foundations, for transportation connections and,
ultimately, for the town's integration in Austrian public life. Tourism is
stagnating and a "fatally substantial emigration" has taken hold,
Suntinger says, adding that national policymakers are doing nothing except
producing "empty phrases of regionalization." "Down below in
Spittal, in the district seat, a school bus makes its rounds once every 10
minutes," he says, "but up here, there is nothing. The development of
the cities is taking place at the expense of rural areas."
Many of Suntinger's concerns seem quite justified. The mayor
would love to turn the currently applicable logic driving funding on its head.
Were it up to him, there wouldn't be a single cent available for home building
subsidies in the valley and the money would instead be funneled to mountain
villages and remote communities like Grosskirchheim -- the further away from
population centers, the more the support available. "It is said," he
says, "that it doesn't matter where you work these days. If that's true,
then it wouldn't be such a bad idea to set up your computer in a beautiful
landscape like ours rather than in a basement in Vienna."
If Peter Suntinger's political profile was limited to his
fight for rural areas and to his last re-election with 79.5 percent of the
votes, he would just be another small-town mayor in Austria. But he is also a
notorious and self-absorbed provocateur who positively invites nasty invective.
During a three-hour discussion in the Grosskirchheim community center, he
reveals more sides than a disco ball. His ideas are all over the map, an odd
amalgam of backwoods and freethought with a generous dose of folkloric
irredentism. His focus is on preserving heimat.
Grosskirchheim lies at the foot of a massif not far from the
Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain at 3,798 meters (12,460 feet).
Suntinger says he has climbed it more than 300 times and has stood on its peak
on new year's day 32 times in the last 34 years, trudging up its slopes with
skis strapped to his back.
Electrified by Haider
He also used to go on frequent mountaineering trips, some of
them technical climbs, with his late friend Jörg Haider, the former right-wing
populist icon who died in a car crash in 2008. Suntinger still has deep
admiration for Haider and he looks back fondly on those days. In contrast to
modern-day politicians who do nothing but emit hot air, he says, Haider was a
man with a social conscience who everyone listened to, no matter if it was the
grandmother in the mountain farmhouse or the bank director in the city. Haider
was an athlete, Suntinger says, he was dynamic and close to the people, often
spending weeks on the road in the country. "That's not easy to do."
Electrified by Haider, Suntinger went into politics for the
FPÖ in the early 1990s. Just as Grosskirchheim is his heimat in real life,
Haider's FPÖ was his political heimat. But that was long ago. Suntinger
despises the party today, it's leaders and fat cats in Vienna who, he says, no
longer have a social conscience and "only want to get to the feeding
trough." In 2013, he suspended his party membership, as he puts it, and
left the party in 2016 even though, as he says with no small degree of pathos:
"In my breast, a freedom-loving heart is still beating."
The party, says Suntinger, is marching in the wrong
direction, falling back to the right-wing fringe, which Haider tried to leave
behind. With all the fraternity members in parliament, he says, the party is in
the process of drifting to the right. "It's bad," Suntinger says.
"That much you know if you know these people." His back ramrod
straight, Suntinger is sitting in the community center in front of a gumweed
plant. He is an enigmatic, mistrustful sort.
Until late in the fall of 2017, his village hosted seven
refugees from Syria, Suntinger says, "and we of course helped them."
He says he personally escorted one of the men from the group to the timber yard
so he could make himself useful "but he didn't really want to work."
The whole thing, he adds, was difficult. "These Syrians, they had mobile
phones, great clothes, they didn't seem like it was about having a roof over
their heads." The refugees after World War II, Suntinger says, had to beg
for a lump of bread and their clothes were in rags.
In Suntinger's world, foreigners are not beneficial, rather
they pose a threat to the status quo, especially if they aren't Christians. A
couple of people from Holland recently moved to Grosskirchheim, but they are
Protestants and thus not too repugnant. But Muslims? That's different, he says,
adding that the townspeople elected him to make sure that no foreigners settle
there.
If a Muslim tried to buy a house in the town, Suntinger
says, he as mayor would speak to the seller and, if necessary, offer more
money. "Soil politics," he calls it. It is, of course, unlikely that
a Muslim would seek to move to Grosskirchheim given such circumstances, but if
you accuse him of merely conducting xenophobic symbolism, he responds that he
isn't xenophobic. And if you ask what he has against Muslims, Suntinger says he
doesn't have anything against Muslims, he just doesn't want them living in
Grosskirchheim. If you then tell him that such logic is that of right-wing
extremists, Suntinger responds that he isn't a right-wing extremist. His own
family, he says, was uprooted, having been forced to flee over the mountains
from Sudetenland, a former region of Germany which is now part of the Czech
Republic, following World War II. "With that kind of background, you don't
become a right-wing nationalist."
It's a pattern that is repeating itself across Austria these
days. People are borrowing from the extremist lexicon while wanting to appear
moderate. Politicians flirt with far-right themes and then act surprised when
they are labeled far right themselves. On the campaign trail, they speak of
North Africans and other "riffraff" but then insist that it please
not be misunderstood. Markus Abwerzger, regional head of the FPÖ in Tyrol, is
one of them. He said North Africans and "riffraff," which doesn't
really fit to him.
The young lawyer was born in 1975 in Dornbirn, a town in the
Vorarlberg region of the Austrian Alps, and lives today in Innsbruck -- a
healthy, laid back type with impressive sideburns. He has a lot on his plate
when we meet. Tyrol has just elected a new regional government. But his main
headache is that a young party official had sent around a WhatsApp message to
party allies with a portrait of Hitler in full Führer uniform along with the
message: "Missing since 1945." These kinds of things, Abwerzger says,
"drive me crazy. It makes my blood boil."
'We Are Not a Nazi Party'
This "Nazi shit" is constantly setting the party
back, he says, these stupid acts are "demoralizing." The focus needs
to be on forging alliances between the center and the right, Abwerzger says.
"We are not a Nazi party. The Nazi insults that we constantly get, in
truth, they trivialize the Nazis."
Abwerzger's political career is typical for his generation
of Austrians. When he was still in high school, where he was a gifted
footballer, the entire postwar order was overturned and the person responsible
for doing so was Jörg Haider. To understand his influence on Austrian society,
it's necessary to understand how things were back then. A system designed to
provide proportional representation had descended into absurdity. Social
Democrats and Christian Democrats had carved up the entire country between
themselves. Initially, it was doubtlessly done with the good-faith intention of
ensuring stability. Ultimately, though, the priority became that of tightening
their grip on power.
Everything in the country, from tennis courts to jobs, from
automobile clubs to schools were either red or black, Social Democratic or
Christian Democratic. And if you belonged to the black team, you didn't play on
the same tennis courts as the Social Democrats, while if you were a red, you
wouldn't be given an apprenticeship at a Christian Democratic enterprise. Some
people joined both parties to keep all their options open. There was no real
opposition in parliament, just a massive grand coalition between the Social
Democrats and Christian Democrats. Laws were enacted without any debate, simply
being agreed upon by the two parties. Austrians had long forgotten what
democracy even looked like. And then along came Haider.
He fought his way to the top of the FPÖ, a tiny party at the
time largely made up of people caught in the past, not a few of whom still
dreamed of a Greater Germany. But then Haider began crisscrossing the country,
a mountaineer who drove fast cars, a clubgoer and cocktail drinker who
nevertheless played the role of people's advocate. He made records with Alpine
choirs and appeared on TV, where he used his sharp wit to destroy the gray men
of the old system.
Outside of Austria, Haider is primarily remembered only for
what he said about the Nazis, such as his claim that the "Third
Reich" had "decent labor market policies." Yes, Haider did, in
fact, say this and other terrible things. But in terms of his impact on
Austrian society, it was of minimal importance. The writer Robert Menasse said
way back in 1995 that Haider had triggered a necessary renewal. Menasse added
that he took the unrepentant Nazis along with him "by occasionally winking
in their direction."
Haider destroyed the old two-party system almost single-handedly,
transforming the FPÖ into a third political force. The party's vote increased
under Haider from between 5 and 10 percent to between 16 and 22 percent. And
then, in 1999, it hit 26.9 percent and formed its first coalition with the
conservatives, one that stunned Europe in 2000. Austria was suddenly a very
different country, largely thanks to Haider.
Now, 18 years later, Tyrol FPÖ boss Markus Abwerzger was
almost named justice minister in the new government in Vienna. But he says he
wanted to wait. His children are still very young, he insists, and he wants to
solidify his base first. By dog-whistling to the Nazis? By equating North
Africans with riffraff?
These types of questions obviously cause the FPÖ politician
some embarrassment. In an election campaign, he says, you have to push certain
buttons. You have to? Well, yes, Abwerzger says. Then he switches back to
attack mode. It's not just the FPÖ who are aggressive, he insists, others also
resort to such tactics. You have to be able to react.
For the FPÖ, that often means journalists. The Austrian
state broadcaster ORF, for example, had to apologize to Abwerzger because it
edited a TV report about the Tyrol election such that it looked like he was
nodding his head in agreement when an old man said that these days you can't
even say "stinking Jew" without being called a Nazi. It would almost
be funny if it weren't so tragic. But Abwergzer, not surprisingly, doesn't see
it as a laughing matter. "I was shocked," he says. "If that had
been allowed to stand, my career would have been over, and my 3-year-old
daughter would be taunted in her kindergarten about having a Nazi papa."
In southern Austria, those driving on the A2 highway in the
direction of Vienna will see a lot of signs for Italy and Slovenia. It's only
one and a half hours from Klagenfurt to Ljubljana, and it takes just three
hours to drive from Villach to Venice. Yet Austrians live in their own separate
world, in which they develop their own inner life, their own internal map of
the country. The train from Vienna to the Slovakian capital of Bratislava takes
just 59 minutes. Innsbruck lies halfway between Germany and Italy in a part of
Austria that is only 50 kilometers (31 miles) wide. Back in the Habsburg era,
the empire may have felt vast and endless, but these days, you're never very
far from a border.
It is a situation that seems to cause a certain amount of
stress in the Alpine country, which isn't particularly spacious, objectively
speaking. There's only limited room in the valleys and the development of the
cities is hampered in many instances. Although the country was an economic
beneficiary of the fall of the Iron Curtain, psychologically it sees itself as
a loser. The Iron Curtain not only divided, it also protected. And by 2015, as
the Balkan route became filled with refugees, there was a return to the vague
primal fear of being overrun by foreign hoards from the east or being
culturally diluted.
It's like being on an emotional rollercoaster. Today, the
nation is revered, celebrated at every folk festival, but that is something of
a new development. For a long time, the nation of Austria was not something
people cared much about, much less felt passionately about. It was perhaps only
in 1978, when Austria defeated Germany by a score of 3:2 in the World Cup in
the Argentinian city of Cordoba, that the country developed something approaching
an identity. For Austria, it was a feeling similar to the one Germany had after
winning the World Cup in 1954 -- that feeling that the country had something to
be proud of.
Traveling through Austria, one is confronted by both
delusions of grandeur and feelings of inferiority, often at the same time. When
Chancellor Kurz embarks on tours of Europe, meeting Merkel, appearing in
Brussels or Berlin, hosting CSU leaders in Linz, the press coverage at home
makes it seem as though a giant is striding across the world stage, writing
history as he goes. And when Kurz is invited to appear on German TV news or
talk shows, the Austrian press makes it seem as though it's the greatest honor
ever bestowed upon a foreign guest in Germany.
War Against Press Freedom
If this were all just a novel, one of the crucial scenes
would undoubtedly be set at the Küniglberg in the west of Vienna, where the
headquarters of broadcaster ORF are located. Everyone passes through its doors
sooner or later and no politician of standing has managed to avoid Armin Wolf,
the host of the station's most important news show.
Wolf is not just a star in Austria. He's also been honored
for his journalism in Germany, deservedly receiving the prestigious Hans
Joachim Friedrich and Grimm prizes. His shows are well moderated and every
interview he conducts is exciting. There's always a moment when he strikes,
surprising his guest with some obscure fact, contradiction, or false statement
from the past. He very often manages to so rattle his interviewee that they say
things they hadn't intended to -- and the way he does it makes it not just a
craft but an art form.
In person, Wolf is a friendly, modest presence, with more
than 30 years under his belt at ORF. He doesn't make a big deal about having
400,000 followers on Twitter and 300,000 on Facebook. And in the end, it may
not help much. There is a debate raging in Austria about the entire ORF brand,
including talk of getting rid of it altogether. There has been an increase in
attacks since the new government took over, with accusations that the state
broadcaster has been "infiltrated by the left" and the populist
spotlight being shone on the fees Austrians must pay to fund the station. A
referendum on its future has even been proposed, and the FPÖ never misses an
opportunity to raise doubts about the quality of ORF.
The problem, says Wolf, is that the FPÖ's demand that the
ORF fee be abolished was the only issue on which the party could score points.
We are sitting together over coffee in the ORF cafeteria, which has all the
charm of a rundown highway rest-stop café. A plate with a sample of the daily
special stands at the entrance and at the next table, a couple of technicians
are speaking so loudly it sounds as if they are trying to talk over a jackhammer.
Wolf suggests moving to a quieter corner. At times, he seems exhausted.
During this year's Carnival season, Vice Chancellor
Heinz-Christian Strache of the FPÖ, posted a fake ad for ORF on his Facebook
page as a "joke." It showed an image of Armin Wolf in a TV studio
overlaid with the text: "There's a place where lies are turned into news.
That place is ORF." Wolf sued Strache and the case was settled out of
court. The FPÖ politician had to issue a public apology in the form of an ad
taken out in the Kronen Zeitung. The episode has its humorous aspects, but the
aftertaste is bitter.
The FPÖ and its supporters are engaged in a veritable war
against press freedom and against any opinions that do not suit their own,
reminiscent of Trump's Twitter tirades. The right has contrived an argument
that tough criticism of their government is an impermissible abuse of press
freedoms -- a rather outrageous stance to take. Reacting to the suggestion that
ORF is not neutral, Wolf says: "I think there's a natural tension between
serious journalism, which is all about differentiating, and populist politics,
which is all about emotions." His facial expression is blank when he says
it -- just like when he goes on the attack during a televised interview.
'On the Fault Line of Our Times'
Populists are in power in Austria but it's sometimes
difficult to define exactly what that means. The tone has become coarser, and
not only in parliament. People who never previously felt the need to get
involved in politics now want to take a stand. There's a new club for
"Grannies against the far right," for example, and other groups for
the young, for the middle-aged, for waiters, athletes, construction workers and
artists, all of whom feel compelled to voice their opinions and fight for their
own worldviews. It's not exactly the worst situation for a society that for
decades was ruled by a self-satisfied political elite.
"Austria lies on the fault line of our times,"
says Stefan Apfl, a serious young man who is editor-in-chief of the small
monthly magazine Datum. In his own way, Apfl too belongs to the Haider
generation. He was still a schoolboy when the legendary FPÖ leader first
stirred up the old political scene. Since then, it's not just politics but the
entire postwar deal in Austria that has been destroyed, one that saw the state
supply everyone with a job, home and leisure time. "This entire supply
chain that once worked has been severed," says Apfl. "And it can't be
fixed. Now the gaps have to be filled -- with xenophobia, for example."
And with a lot of heimat. Across the country, no matter
where you tune in on any weekday morning, you will find the program "Guten
Morgen Österreich," or "Good Morning Austria," on ORF.
The show is broadcast from a mobile studio that travels
around the country and stops in a different village each day. Bands play in in
village squares, people talk about herbs and recipes, there are gardening tips
and magic tricks -- and ORF makes sure that no one has a bad word to say about
anything.
There's pop music, webcams on the top of mountains,
panoramas from the Alpine peaks of Gamskogel and Kitzsteinhorn, from Kasberg,
Arlberg and Wildkogel. It's almost like Austrians feel like tourists in their
own country.
Or like an audience watching itself, such as in the Raimund
Theater in Vienna, which is staging the patriotic musical comedy, "I Am
from Austria." Busloads of Austrians arrive day after day to take in the
story of an Austrian actress who has become famous in Hollywood and returned
home for a visit. Between the Grand Hotel, opera balls and the Alpenglow, she
not only finds the man of her dreams, but also a newfound love for her
homeland. The emotional climax is when the beautiful heroine, after some tender
yodeling, sings the title song: "I Am from Austria."
It's not easy to quote from the text, as it's mostly
performed in dialect. The basic premise is that the homeland melts the ice in
her soul, things like that, and that she is envious of the storks with whom it
would be so nice to fly, as an Austrian over Austria. It may sound like kitsch,
but the song -- written in 1989 by Reinhard Fendrich who is world famous if you
come from the Alps -- has become the country's unofficial anthem.
In the original video, Fendrich is shown leaning against the
cross at the summit of the Grossglockner mountain with his guitar and the
modern folk song quickly became a hit across the country. Today, it is sung
when Austrians win at any sports event, during football matches or even when
bowling buddies get together for a few beers.
The current president, Alexander Van der Bellen, used the
song in his final, perhaps decisive campaign ad. He only just barely managed to
beat out his FPÖ opponent. The song, in other words, says a lot about the
country -- particularly when you know how it came about.
It was written in the 1980s as the country was rocked by the
scandal surrounding Kurt Waldheim. The former UN secretary-general had hopes of
being elected Austrian president until the true extent of his wartime and Nazi
past was revealed.
Reinhard Fendrich was unhappy about the resulting image of
his country in the world. And he wanted to combat the impression that all
Austrians were in actuality unrepentant Nazis. He wanted to show that there
were still lots of good reasons to love this beautiful country.
The nerve that he struck back then still throbs today. And
these days, it is once again exposed. And it hurts more than ever.
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