WIENER ZEITUNG: Colin Freeman, Chief Foreign Correspondent of British quality newspaper Sunday Telegraph, has spoken with Heinz-Christian Strache, the FPÖ leader whose party did well in Austria's September 28 general election, about Europe's "Islamisation" and misinterpretations of Nazi gestures.
Ever since the general election, they have been subjects of fierce debate in the country's beer-cellers and cafes. When does raising three fingers in the air make you a fascist - and when does it just mean "three beers please?"
Ask Strache, whose far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) won close to a shocking 20 per cent of the vote, and he rolls his eyes in a way that looks at once weary and slightly scary. The photo in which he is shown holding up three fingers does not, he insists, depict a neo-Nazi gesture - that's just a "misinterpretation" put about by liberals.
Lest I prove to be one of the numerous people who are sceptical about his denial, he invites me to try it myself.
"Go on, imagine that you are in a bar, where the music is very loud and where the bartender can't hear your voice," he says. "What sign do you make if you want to order three beers?"
Sure enough, I raise my hand and find it outstretched in a very similar fashion to how Strache does it. "You see?" he grins, warming to his theme. "Now imagine you are holding your arm out for a taxi in the street. Does that make you look like you're raising your arm like Hitler?"
Whatever the truth of the matter, it isn't the only thing on which Strache claims that people have got the wrong end of the stick about recently. When other photographs surfaced of him wearing army fatigues and clutching a gun, he claimed that it wasn't a neo-Nazi training camp as alleged, but just a day out paintballing.
And when it was alleged that some of his fellow "paintballers" were known extremists, he claimed that they were old acquintances with whom he no longer associated.
And, by the way, he tells me, that three-fingered salute, it's not a neo-Nazi thing at all but a secret signal that people used in the former East Germany to imply that they were against Communism. Why he didn't just say that in the first place hasn't been explained.
Yet for all that, Strache asks for benefit of the doubt a lot, and it seems as though a large percentage of the Austrian public is willing to give it to him. Campaigning on the basis of hardline anti-immigration and anti-EU themes, his Freedom Party polled 18 per cent of the parliamentary vote, while the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), a splinter of the Freedom Party run by Strache's one-time mentor Jörg Haider, picked up a further 11 per cent.
Combined, it means that nearly one-third of Austrian voters now back extremist parties, making them contenders for a major role in government and prompting fears of a far-right revival across Europe.
Adding to the discomfiture of more-liberal Austrian politicians is that most of the far-right's votes have come at the expense of the mainstream Social Democrats and conservative People's Parties, whose ruling coalition is seen as having ignored rising discontent over immigration and crime - and what many Austrians say is a glaring link between the two.
There is no fear of such politically-correct coyness in Strache's case. He wants wayward foreigners who scrounge from Austria's generous benefits system deported and advocates a ban on the building of all mosques to prevent the continuaton of alleged creeping Islamisation. He also claims that Austria's gentle, law-abiding children are being robbed, beaten up and sexually harassed by gangs of rapacious immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere.
"In some school classes, just two out of 30 children are Austrian, and they are confronted with racism every day," he says. "It is inverse racism. Austrian youths are beaten up in discos." I'm Not a Nazi and I Like Kebabs, Says FPÖ Leader Strache >>> | October 7, 2008
IRISH TIMES:
Social Democrats Asked to Lead Austrian Coalition >>> | October 8, 2008
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