Owen Jones rightly identifies the Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) as having an unashamedly dangerous Nazi pedigree (On the streets of Vienna, I saw Austrians’ rage at the march of the far right – but also their helplessness, 8 October). When it first joined a coalition with the ÖVP in 2000, the majority of Austrians were mortified and took to the streets. The new ministers had to use a tunnel to avoid the wrath of the protesters.
It seems the Overton window has lurched quite a bit to the right since then, and the Freedom party has become salonfähig (respectable). This time no one was ashamed to admit who they would be voting for, and thus their victory came as no surprise, except to me and many others here. Why? Because these were not typical far-right extremists choosing the FPÖ. Weirdly, those new voters did not seem informed (or to care) about the more sinister aspects of this party’s platform.
True, a significant number of their voters were middle-aged men from rural areas with low diversity, baying for “remigration”. That has always been the FPÖ’s core support base. However, the additional voters who won the party first place in the elections appear to be better-educated citizens, who simply had an axe to grind about the previous government’s handling of the pandemic, in particular the compulsory vaccination policy.
The positive aspect is that I don’t feel surrounded by neo-Nazis. The negative and scary side is that the spirits they innocently summoned will wreak their revenge once in power. No doubt it was just this critical mass of nice, normal people who were cheering Hitler in 1938.
Caroline Fiedler
Gänserndorf, Austria
This is heartbreaking. I’m someone who recently acquired Austrian citizenship, through their policy of offering it as a sort of hand of reconciliation to people displaced in the Nazi era. There was a ceremony, at which the ambassador said, “Don’t thank us, we’re restoring something that was taken from you.” It was very moving. It felt like the world was growing up, just a bit.
Although I’d applied mainly to keep my EU citizenship, it led to a proper exploration of my family history, of the few who got out, the many who didn’t, and of the movement to restore and add names, especially to graves in Vienna’s main Jewish cemetery. I genuinely felt proud to be a restored Austrian, until this recent election destroyed my perceptions. If a far-right government is formed, I feel I should hand my citizenship certificate back and say: “Sorry, but you haven’t grown up at all.”
Timothy Jokl
Spital, Merseyside
In Owen Jones’s recent piece on the rise of the far right in Austria, he references the FPÖ’s Nazi roots in the postwar era. While I am no fan of the FPÖ, I believe this point risks overemphasis within a society where a significant proportion of the population would have been, in wartime, supporters of or sympathetic to the Nazi regime.
Many Austrian leaders of that period who implemented meaningful social reforms also had Nazi affiliations, and yet we don’t constantly prefix their accomplishments with references to their wartime sympathies. The FPÖ is a party of bad ideas, rooted in xenophobia and illiberal policies, but it seems unnecessary to dog-whistle Nazi connections every time the party is mentioned, as if its present-day views and members weren’t troubling enough.
Criticism of the FPÖ should centre on its current platform, which includes anti-immigrant policies and authoritarian tendencies reminiscent of far-right parties globally. These policies, rather than historical Nazi associations, are the real threat to liberal democracy today. Overemphasising the past risks detracting from the urgent need to confront the ideas the party promotes in the present.
Andrew Winter Done
Walchwil, Switzerland