2024-10-03
8 分钟Although they have not achieved a majority, Austria’s Nazi-linked FPÖ party claimed victory after receiving the highest amount of votes at the weekend’s election. Andrew Mueller explains the group’s past and what we may learn for the present. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This past weekend's parliamentary election in Austria was not the first demonstration that Austrian voters take what might be charitably described as a forgiving view of attitudes and associations which would likely, or so you'd hope, be disqualifying elsewhere.
Good evening.
There are new charges tonight that former.
UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was a suspect war criminal in 1986, most infamously, former Foreign Minister and former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim ran for Austria's presidency.
During that campaign, it emerged that Waldheim had fudged certain aspects of his resume, specifically that during one portion of his service in the Wehrmacht during World War II, he had been an intelligence officer deployed in the Balkans in a region where the German army had committed hideous atrocities.
The whole story is invented.
There is nothing in it.
Waldheim professed ignorance of any war crimes which may have been perpetrated in his vicinity.
International skepticism was perhaps best summed up by the British satirical magazine Private Eye, which reacted with a cover image of Joseph Goebbels speaking to Adolf Hitler.
The caption in the speech, message from Kurt.
He has no idea what's going on.
Waldheim won anyway.
The point of this history lesson being that the victory on Sunday of the Freedom Party of Austria, or fpo, while significant, is not really surprising.
The FPO are a known quantity.
The party was founded in the 1950s by Anton Reinthaler, a former Nazi Party member and SS officer.
And while it affected Conservative centrism for a while, it reverted to type in the 1980s under the leadership of Jorg Hayde, Governor of Carinthia and unsavory crank who in 1999 led the FPO into a coalition government and Austria into an amount of international odium.
I think I will have the opportunity to explain him at some time what the real background of the philosophy and the program of the Freedom Party is.
And everybody is invited to clean up in front of his own door before giving some advices to other countries and to other politicians.
The FPO returned to coalition government in 2017 and left it in richly hilarious circumstances.
In 2019, the FPO, FPO's then leader, Heinz Christian Stracke, failed to consider the possibility that a comely young Russian woman proposing certain business arrangements in an Ibiza cocktail lounge may not have been entirely on the level.