Neo-Fascists Win Big in Austria

World | Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:08:50 pm PDT

White nationalists are on their way back into power in Austria: Austrian Party That Wants to Bring Back Nazi Imagery Wins Big.

Students of history may feel misgivings at this point.

And a reminder: the Austrian Freedom Party’s Heinz-Christian Strache was one of the organizers of that neo-fascist Trojan Horse “anti-Islamisation” meeting in Cologne.

In Austria’s recent national elections, voters gave significant support to a party that seeks to bring back Nazi symbols and salutes. The anti-immigrant Freedom Party (FPO), headed by Heinz-Christian Strache, former dental assistant and representative of Europe’s Cities Against Islamisation group, won 18 percent of the vote.

Another anti-immigrant party, the Alliance for Austria’s Future, led by Jörg Haider, a former Freedom Party leader who broke away and formed a new party in 2005, got 11 percent of the vote. Together, these allied parties won almost a third of the vote, giving them huge gains over the traditional leading parties, the center-left Social Democrats and the conservative Austrian People’s Party.

According to AFP, “the exact distribution of the 183 parliamentary seats will only be officially announced on October 6, 2008. But the combined score of the far-right parties would put them in second place ahead of the conservatives.”