Nazi-Founded Party Poised To Take Power In Austria

September 28, 2024 Extremists, Politics

NBC News reports:

Politics in a central European country of just 10 million people might not seem consequential. But that’s not the case in Austria, where there’s a good chance its election Sunday will be won by a far-right, pro-Russia party that was founded by former Nazis.

A win for the Freedom Party, or FPÖ, would not just have historical connotations — Austria was the birthplace of Adolf Hitler — it could tilt the balance of power between Russia and the West.

The FPÖ is led by Herbert Kickl, 55, a wiry, acerbic provocateur in designer glasses. He has been branded as “Volkskanzler” or “People’s Chancellor,” by his party, a term most associated with the Nazis who used it to describe Hitler. Indeed the FPÖ was founded in the 1950s by former members of Hiter’s paramilitary group the SS.

Politico Europe reports:

Similar to the former East Germany, which never undertook a full reckoning with its Nazi past (and has voted in droves for the far right in recent weeks), Austria spent most of the postwar period running from history, spinning the fiction that it was Hitler’s “first victim.”

Even though the country has made some progress on that front in recent years, the decades it spent living in denial left a deep mark on the country’s political culture, which explains why it’s possible for a party literally born out of Nazism to draw such strong support.

The party maybe have evolved into the kind of anti-migrant, anti-Islam populist force that has taken hold across much of Europe, but it began as a political refuge for former Nazis. Not only has the FPÖ not disavowed that past, it embraces it — at least in private — with the leading party figures regularly getting to trouble for paying quiet tribute to their Nazi forebears.

Cross your fingers, folks.



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