Austrian Politics

A year or so ago, the right-wing proto-neo-pseudo-fascist party led by clever charismatic enigmatic Jorg Haidar had won the parliamentary elections and formed a coalition government. Outraged, the other EU countries had blackballed Austria within the EU. I thought this was indefensible, hypocritical (no one proposed blackballing governments with Communist coalition partner), and grossly anti-democratic.

Thomas said that glorifying Nazism is illegal under the Austrian constitution (clearly anti-democratic but understandable given Austria's past including the German takeover in 1938). But Haidar, like recent right-wing xenophobes elsewhere (such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen or David Duke), encrypted his bigotry, saying things such as that SS officers should be thanked for defending Germany from the Communists. Was this a prosecutable offense? Or grounds for intervention? Fortunately, the EU's attempted boycott fizzled out, as so many EU issues do.

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ã Copyright 2002 David Alexander Smith