{UAH} Nazi PartyLoses Austrian election — barely !!!
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Paul Mugerwa/ Robert Atuhairwe,
Europe is this morning breathing with a huge sigh of relief that the
Nazi Austrian Freedom Party just barely failed to achieve a fascist
restoration for the first time since 1945. It failed just by a mere
30,000 votes to cause a political earthquake in Europe. In the end, it
took the youth vote to defeat the Nazis.
Paul Mugerwa, I agree with you that the support for the far-right does
not necessarily translate into support for the fascists or even a call
for Nazi restoration. I agree with you that the liberal parties in
Austria, and in much of Europe, made a huge blunder by opening their
borders to nearly 2 million muslim immigrants, completely against the
wishes of their population. In Austria, both the Social Democratic and
Conservative paries, which have between them, exchanged power since
1945, were completely rejected by the electorate. Completely
dissilusioned and very angry by the influx of thousands of muslim men
into their country, the Austrian working classes voted by a staggering
81% for the Nazi leader, and it took the energetic campaign of a
retired left-wing professor and the environmental Green Party to save
Austria.
But I think the issues are very clear now for the European parties
because they know they will all loose power if they allow any further
muslim migration. The UK in particular completely refused to open its
doors, because the same that has happened in Austria would have
happened in the UK if David Cameron had allowed Syrian refugees to
come to the UK. The UK has recieved less than 10,000 muslim refugees,
compared to about 2 million in Germany, Austria, Greece and the former
Eastern Europe.
In the end, the only solution to the exodus of people from the Middle
East is a political solution to the blood-bath. Islamic terrorism must
be ended as a precursor to any meaningful politcial solution and the
muslims themselves, especially the enlightened ones, must play a role
in this. Migration will not solve the problem of mass killings and
human misery in the muslim heartland in the Middle-East- it will only
export it.
Bobby
A party founded by Nazis just lost the Austrian election — barely
Zack Beauchamp on May 23, 2016,
Austria's far-right Freedom Party was founded in 1956, its leadership
full of former Nazis. Though it has twice been part of coalition
governments, the party has been relatively marginal in Austrian
politics.
But it just came within a hair's breadth of winning control of
Austria's presidency. In runoff results announced on Monday morning,
the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost to the Green Party's
Alexander Van der Bellen — by a 0.6 percentage point margin:
To be clear, Austria's president is a historically ceremonial
position — the leader of the parliamentary majority, called the
federal chancellor, generally wields power. That person is Christian
Kern of the center-left Social Democratic Party.
And the Freedom Party isn't openly fascist, nor are its leaders Nazis.
But it's still a very hard-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
organization — to the point of being outright racist. And the fact
that it came this close to victory in a national election illustrates
just how powerful the far right is becoming across Europe.
The Austrian Freedom Party is riding an anti-immigrant wave
(Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images)
The Freedom Party's power has ebbed and flowed over the course of
modern Austrian history. In 1999, it won 26.9 percent of the national
parliamentary vote under the leadership of Jörg Haider, a firebrand
who once celebrated the Nazis for their "decent job creation
policies." This led to it joining a coalition led by the center-right
People's Party in 2000.
Haider won by railing against Austria's two dominant political
parties, the People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. A major
part of his complaint was Austria's relatively open immigration
policy: In 2003, 12.5 percent of Austrian residents were foreign-born.
Haider accused the mainstream parties of permitting "foreign
infiltration."
Haider died in 2008, shortly after his party collapsed to just 11
percent in the 2006 elections. But the Freedom Party has made a
comeback in recent years.
"The [Freedom Party's] support is steadily growing: for more than a
year it has topped every representative poll, being consistently
backed by around 30 per cent of the respondents," political scientists
Philip Rathgeb and Fabio Wolkenstein write at the London School of
Economics' Europe blog.
According to Rathgeb and Wolkenstein, there are a number of reasons
for this, including a slow economy and a political stalemate between
the two dominant parties that has stymied policymaking. But
immigration is a major part of the story.
Austria's longstanding nativist streak came to the fore in the summer
of 2015, when the European refugee crisis became the continent's
dominant political issue. The Freedom Party has cast Syrian and other
Muslim refugees as a threat to Christian-European civilization. This
message has clearly resonated with Austrian voters, a majority of whom
think their country is on the wrong track.
"We don't want an Islamization of Europe," Heinz-Christian Strache,
the Freedom Party's leader, told Austria's public broadcaster in an
interview (per the New York Times). "We don't want our
Christian-Western culture to perish."
Freedom Party pressure was so severe that the previous Social
Democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann, reversed his pro-refugee
policy, closing Austria's borders to refugees and asylum seekers.
Initially, that wasn't enough to stop the Freedom Party: It won a
plurality in the first round of Austria's presidential election in
April, forcing a runoff between Hofer and Van der Bellen.
Happily, Van der Bellen won. But the closeness of the race illustrates
that the Freedom Party is still troublingly popular and influential.
"Austrian voters are likely rally around whomever [Hofer's] opponent
is in an attempt to halt the party's rise," the Financial Times's
Ralph Atkins wrote in a prescient piece in April. "But Vienna's policy
reversal over immigration showed the party's growing influence over
Austria policies."
This reflects a troubling Europe-wide trend
The Freedom Party has for some time been Europe's most effective
far-right party. But it's far from alone — and evidence suggests that
support for far-right parties has grown in the past several years.
That's almost certainly a result of the refugee crisis.
Der Spiegel has a nice map on this, showing the countries where
far-right parties have a presence in parliament (yellow dots) or are
actually part of the government (red dots). It turns out the
xenophobic far right has surged in countries as diverse as Sweden, the
UK, the Netherlands, and Hungary:
These parties have, in most cases, ridden the European refugee and
migrant crisis to power. Austrians, like many Europeans, have been
skeptical of immigration for some time. But the huge surge in migrants
last year dramatically inflamed these sentiments — leading to a rise
in the far right's poll numbers. Italy's Northern League, for example,
is polling at four times what it was in 2013.
Political science research shows that the support for the European far
right is driven principally by fear of immigration.
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a comparative politics professor at the
University of Bergen in Norway, examined seven European countries with
far-right parties in a 2008 paper. Specifically, she was looking to
see what drove people to the populist right: dissatisfaction with the
economy, distrust in political institutions, or anti-immigrant
sentiment.
Her findings were unambiguous: "As immigration policy preferences
become more restrictive, the probability of voting for the populist
right increases dramatically," Ivarsflaten found. By contrast, voters
with right-wing economic views were barely more likely to vote for the
far right than other voters. Ditto those who didn't trust politicians
very much, as the below charts make clear:
Y-axis is probability of voting for a far-right party; x-axis is the
level of support for restrictive immigration policies, right-wing
economic views, etc.
"This study therefore to a large extent settles the debate about which
grievances unite all populist right parties," Ivarsflaten concluded.
"The answer is the grievances arising from Europe's ongoing
immigration crisis."
The immigration crisis today is, of course, much worse than it was
when Ivarsflaten's piece was published in 2008. Hence why the Freedom
Party and its far-right brethren are on the march throughout Europe.
--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Europe is this morning breathing with a huge sigh of relief that the
Nazi Austrian Freedom Party just barely failed to achieve a fascist
restoration for the first time since 1945. It failed just by a mere
30,000 votes to cause a political earthquake in Europe. In the end, it
took the youth vote to defeat the Nazis.
Paul Mugerwa, I agree with you that the support for the far-right does
not necessarily translate into support for the fascists or even a call
for Nazi restoration. I agree with you that the liberal parties in
Austria, and in much of Europe, made a huge blunder by opening their
borders to nearly 2 million muslim immigrants, completely against the
wishes of their population. In Austria, both the Social Democratic and
Conservative paries, which have between them, exchanged power since
1945, were completely rejected by the electorate. Completely
dissilusioned and very angry by the influx of thousands of muslim men
into their country, the Austrian working classes voted by a staggering
81% for the Nazi leader, and it took the energetic campaign of a
retired left-wing professor and the environmental Green Party to save
Austria.
But I think the issues are very clear now for the European parties
because they know they will all loose power if they allow any further
muslim migration. The UK in particular completely refused to open its
doors, because the same that has happened in Austria would have
happened in the UK if David Cameron had allowed Syrian refugees to
come to the UK. The UK has recieved less than 10,000 muslim refugees,
compared to about 2 million in Germany, Austria, Greece and the former
Eastern Europe.
In the end, the only solution to the exodus of people from the Middle
East is a political solution to the blood-bath. Islamic terrorism must
be ended as a precursor to any meaningful politcial solution and the
muslims themselves, especially the enlightened ones, must play a role
in this. Migration will not solve the problem of mass killings and
human misery in the muslim heartland in the Middle-East- it will only
export it.
Bobby
A party founded by Nazis just lost the Austrian election — barely
Zack Beauchamp on May 23, 2016,
Austria's far-right Freedom Party was founded in 1956, its leadership
full of former Nazis. Though it has twice been part of coalition
governments, the party has been relatively marginal in Austrian
politics.
But it just came within a hair's breadth of winning control of
Austria's presidency. In runoff results announced on Monday morning,
the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, lost to the Green Party's
Alexander Van der Bellen — by a 0.6 percentage point margin:
To be clear, Austria's president is a historically ceremonial
position — the leader of the parliamentary majority, called the
federal chancellor, generally wields power. That person is Christian
Kern of the center-left Social Democratic Party.
And the Freedom Party isn't openly fascist, nor are its leaders Nazis.
But it's still a very hard-right, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim
organization — to the point of being outright racist. And the fact
that it came this close to victory in a national election illustrates
just how powerful the far right is becoming across Europe.
The Austrian Freedom Party is riding an anti-immigrant wave
(Jan Hetfleisch/Getty Images)
The Freedom Party's power has ebbed and flowed over the course of
modern Austrian history. In 1999, it won 26.9 percent of the national
parliamentary vote under the leadership of Jörg Haider, a firebrand
who once celebrated the Nazis for their "decent job creation
policies." This led to it joining a coalition led by the center-right
People's Party in 2000.
Haider won by railing against Austria's two dominant political
parties, the People's Party and the Social Democratic Party. A major
part of his complaint was Austria's relatively open immigration
policy: In 2003, 12.5 percent of Austrian residents were foreign-born.
Haider accused the mainstream parties of permitting "foreign
infiltration."
Haider died in 2008, shortly after his party collapsed to just 11
percent in the 2006 elections. But the Freedom Party has made a
comeback in recent years.
"The [Freedom Party's] support is steadily growing: for more than a
year it has topped every representative poll, being consistently
backed by around 30 per cent of the respondents," political scientists
Philip Rathgeb and Fabio Wolkenstein write at the London School of
Economics' Europe blog.
According to Rathgeb and Wolkenstein, there are a number of reasons
for this, including a slow economy and a political stalemate between
the two dominant parties that has stymied policymaking. But
immigration is a major part of the story.
Austria's longstanding nativist streak came to the fore in the summer
of 2015, when the European refugee crisis became the continent's
dominant political issue. The Freedom Party has cast Syrian and other
Muslim refugees as a threat to Christian-European civilization. This
message has clearly resonated with Austrian voters, a majority of whom
think their country is on the wrong track.
"We don't want an Islamization of Europe," Heinz-Christian Strache,
the Freedom Party's leader, told Austria's public broadcaster in an
interview (per the New York Times). "We don't want our
Christian-Western culture to perish."
Freedom Party pressure was so severe that the previous Social
Democratic chancellor, Werner Faymann, reversed his pro-refugee
policy, closing Austria's borders to refugees and asylum seekers.
Initially, that wasn't enough to stop the Freedom Party: It won a
plurality in the first round of Austria's presidential election in
April, forcing a runoff between Hofer and Van der Bellen.
Happily, Van der Bellen won. But the closeness of the race illustrates
that the Freedom Party is still troublingly popular and influential.
"Austrian voters are likely rally around whomever [Hofer's] opponent
is in an attempt to halt the party's rise," the Financial Times's
Ralph Atkins wrote in a prescient piece in April. "But Vienna's policy
reversal over immigration showed the party's growing influence over
Austria policies."
This reflects a troubling Europe-wide trend
The Freedom Party has for some time been Europe's most effective
far-right party. But it's far from alone — and evidence suggests that
support for far-right parties has grown in the past several years.
That's almost certainly a result of the refugee crisis.
Der Spiegel has a nice map on this, showing the countries where
far-right parties have a presence in parliament (yellow dots) or are
actually part of the government (red dots). It turns out the
xenophobic far right has surged in countries as diverse as Sweden, the
UK, the Netherlands, and Hungary:
These parties have, in most cases, ridden the European refugee and
migrant crisis to power. Austrians, like many Europeans, have been
skeptical of immigration for some time. But the huge surge in migrants
last year dramatically inflamed these sentiments — leading to a rise
in the far right's poll numbers. Italy's Northern League, for example,
is polling at four times what it was in 2013.
Political science research shows that the support for the European far
right is driven principally by fear of immigration.
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, a comparative politics professor at the
University of Bergen in Norway, examined seven European countries with
far-right parties in a 2008 paper. Specifically, she was looking to
see what drove people to the populist right: dissatisfaction with the
economy, distrust in political institutions, or anti-immigrant
sentiment.
Her findings were unambiguous: "As immigration policy preferences
become more restrictive, the probability of voting for the populist
right increases dramatically," Ivarsflaten found. By contrast, voters
with right-wing economic views were barely more likely to vote for the
far right than other voters. Ditto those who didn't trust politicians
very much, as the below charts make clear:
Y-axis is probability of voting for a far-right party; x-axis is the
level of support for restrictive immigration policies, right-wing
economic views, etc.
"This study therefore to a large extent settles the debate about which
grievances unite all populist right parties," Ivarsflaten concluded.
"The answer is the grievances arising from Europe's ongoing
immigration crisis."
The immigration crisis today is, of course, much worse than it was
when Ivarsflaten's piece was published in 2008. Hence why the Freedom
Party and its far-right brethren are on the march throughout Europe.
--
Disclaimer:Everyone posting to this Forum bears the sole responsibility for any legal consequences of his or her postings, and hence statements and facts must be presented responsibly. Your continued membership signifies that you agree to this disclaimer and pledge to abide by our Rules and Guidelines.To unsubscribe from this group, send email to: ugandans-at-heart+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
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