Anti-migrant, anti-Islam FPÖ could emerge as most voted for party in Sunday’s parliamentary poll
After winning the EU elections in June, Austria’s far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) seized the moment, calling for the appointment of a EU “remigration” commissioner to be tasked with the forced return of migrants and citizens with a migration background to their countries of origin.
The muted reaction that followed was a sharp contrast to Germany, where months earlier, allegations that members of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) had attended a meeting at which they discussed remigration dominated headlines and prompted tens of thousands to take to the streets in protest.
The difference was not lost on Farid Hafez, a senior researcher at Georgetown University. In Austria, “there was no outcry,” he said. “This is the normalisation of racism that the far right has achieved and that has become a very normal part of daily Austrian politics.”
They managed to normalize the idea, that there is “real” citizens and people who only hold the citizenship. It is Blut und Boden like from Hitlers Nazis all along. The problem is that these ideas have infiltrated large swaths of politics in Austria and Germany, so people claiming to be conservative or liberal now subscribe to the same principles of hard Nazi ideology, just worded differently.