Since Sunday you could not open the US or European newspapers I read and not find some speculative commentary about the  election results in Austria. A 31 year-old and his conservative party ÖVP won, closely followed by the neo-Nazi populist party FPÖ with whom they are in conversation over a coalition/majority government. Babyface Sebastian Kurz led his party into this win by aggressively pushing an agenda that focussed on anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia and the restriction of refugee influx, including the closure of the Balkan routes which are safer escape routes for Syrians than crossing the Mediterranean. (Here is a profile published before the election. http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/sebastian-kurz-hitting-the-austrian-election-trail-a-1172254.html

Add to that a decidedly anti-Semitic bend, overt racism and an anti-European agenda and you have Heinz-Christian Strache and his minions the FPÖ, now potentially governing with increased power. The FPÖ was already deeply ingrained in communal governments – their work there boasted of the fact that they refused housing for refugees unless the latter demonstrated fluent German, shortened any grants or expenses for cultural organizations that were deemed non-traditional, and established educational regulations that promoted exclusively Christian goals and information. Despite multiple scandals during their reign the people of Austria flocked to give them their vote.

Austrians have demonstrated an affinity for populist “values” before – when Hitler annexed the country in 1938 they were out in force welcoming him, and they ratified the annexation shortly thereafter with more than a 2/3 majority (the official NS version of over 90 % was debunked as falsified.) Much work has been done to show that later exculpatory attempts of historians around the Anschluss, claiming that the Austrians were forced into this mindset, were politically motivated and not true to the facts.

Here is a press photograph of the two women partnered with the respective election winners, doing a victory lap Sunday night – Blondies rule once again.

Attached are two good sources that describe the history in detail, with the Holocaust Museum providing background history.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anschluss-and-austrias-guilty-conscience-795016.html

https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/anschluss

What gets to me is the new normal: when the populist Right got elected in 2000, the Israeli government threatened to recall its ambassador. Avraham Burg, the speaker of the Knesset, warned: “It’s very sad that 50 years after the Holocaust, the people of Austria are reluctant to understand the awful tragedy that the Nazi party brought to the world,” said Mr Burg. “We call on the world not to be silent and to strongly condemn the fact that a party which is very right wing and racist is going to be a legitimate part of the parliament in Austria.”https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/feb/03/austria 

Action, not just words.

And today: we wake up in our own country to the following tidbits: Right-wing twitter accounts associated with Scaramucci (remember him and his 15 seconds of fame?) post the following:

A Halloween costume manufacturer offers the following:

https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/1.817676

And then there is this:

 https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/us-anti-semitic-incidents-spike-86-percent-so-far-in-2017

The rot refuses to die, no matter how much we want to tear it all down. Having been underground in the dark with optimal conditions for growth it is now an exploding fungus. The pretty surfaces of Innsbruck, one of Austria’s picturesque cities, cover harsher realities.

The monument below was built just after the war by the French, as a memorial to her fallen soldiers. Eventually it acquired the words “Pro Libertate Austriae Mortuis,” to honor all of  the war dead.
Close to the war memorial stands a much smaller memorial in shape of a Menorah for the victims of Kristallnacht, November 9 1938, initiated in 1997 (in a school contest!) The right-leaning Kronenzeitung came out with a complaint, predictably prefacing its concerns about money and questions about ulterior motives with “Nothing against memorials, but —.” The memorial features a menorah design, and a separate sign nearby with the details of the pogrom in Innsbruck. I unfortunately don’t have a photograph.