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.”
Not surprising, white nationalist movements were always there but only somewhat recently they stopped using extreme rhetoric in order to get more supporters, and it’s super effective. Nowadays you have even mildly exclusionary people who wouldn’t have supported white nationalists spout anti-immigration nonsense online and irl, voting for the far-right thinking they’re solving some issue that doesn’t really exist in reality and is massively overblown.
The world is going back to authoritarianism.