Covidiots
The far-right Freedom Party placed itself at the center of corona-skeptic demonstrations which took place in Vienna over the weekend
Servus!
The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) has, as Markus Sulzbacher reported in the Standard Tuesday, taken the reins of the street-based corona-skeptic1 protest movement whose actions in Vienna have become ever-more conspicuous since the turn of the year. Over the weekend, 15,000 people were estimated to have taken part in various demonstrations organized all over the city, attracting members of the far-right including supporters of the identitarian movement, QAnon, and neo-Nazis in the process. Vienna police confirmed 42 people were arrested; 60 were charged with criminal offences and more than 3,000 with administrative ones.
The weekend’s protests concentrated on a not-insubstantial rally organized by the FPÖ held on Saturday in the Prater, one of Vienna’s largest public parks. As I covered in the Jewish Chronicle this week, front and center at the event was the FPÖ’s number two, Herbert Kickl, the head of the party’s parliamentary faction. As the colors of both the current and imperial-era German flags fluttered in the audience, Kickl among other things condemned chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s recent trip to Israel in no uncertain terms:
For me, one thing is clear: Israel is not a praiseworthy vaccination state deserving of our jealously. … Israel is no ‘healthcare paradise’; rather, it is currently a land of ‘unfreedom’ whose example we would not like to follow. … What’s going on in Israel right now is on the one hand a mass experiment on the part of the pharma industry and on the other a system of ‘healthcare apartheid.’ … I want a chancellor who’s no lobbyist for the pharma industry but instead a lobbyist for our freedoms and fundamental rights.
For his role in the demonstrations, senior figures in the governing People’s Party (ÖVP) have called for Kickl’s resignation from frontline politics. (Indeed, the very same ÖVP who, in 2017, formed a government with the FPÖ that made Kickl interior minister and thus head of the country’s police and security services.) Interior minister Karl Nehammer said Kickl’s rabble-rousing speech endangered the work of Vienna’s police maintaining law and order at the weekend’s demos. ÖVP security spokesperson called Kickl the “ringleader” of Austria’s corona deniers, the “patron saint of right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists.”
The scale of the arrests do suggest, as the interior minister said, that the emerging corona-skeptic or corona-denial movement constitutes a security threat. German Reichsbürger, members of a movement that does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German state, are known to have partaken in previous corona-related demos in Vienna. On the fringes of this week’s protests, a mob which included activists associated with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party stormed the offices of a Viennese health insurance company. One person was charged at a demo for violating Austria’s ban on Nazi-related activities for making the Hitler salute. Videos captured by far-right watching groups are circulating online of protesters shouting ‘Sieg Heil’ or making antisemitic remarks.
In addition, if it wasn’t clear before, the corona-skeptic movement now also constitutes a political problem. Though party boss Norbert Hofer was notably absent from the demonstrations (though he later issued a press release condemning the “criminalization” of supposedly innocent protestors), three FPÖ bigwigs including Kickl and the party’s healthcare spokesperson Dagmar Belakowitsch were reportedly charged with violating Austria’s anti-coronavirus measures during last weekend’s protests. FPÖ secretary general Michael Schnedlitz was also present. Where once the party merely flirted with the corona-skeptic movement, it is now has placed itself at its very center, becoming its voice and representative within organized parliamentary politics and adopting its bogus narrative that masks and vaccinations represent a threat to our fundamental freedoms. The FPÖ’s capacity to destabilize Austrian politics should not be underestimated.
Bis bald!
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Corona-skeptic, in the sense that they question the origins and seriousness of the virus and oppose all measures that might halt the virus’s spread such as lockdowns, masks, and mass vaccination.