Under the motto “FIX ZAM against the right!” The first event will take place next Thursday. “We are fighting for a world of solidarity, a society that looks forward and does not go back in step to the last millennium,” explain the organizers.
“On Thursday October 3rd we will be “DO!” again,” said an Instagram post on Sunday evening, which has been viewed more than 600,000 times so far. The event starts in front of Parliament at 6 p.m., with the final rally taking place at 8:15 p.m Clock planned at Maria-Theresien-Platz. They say decisively “No to a right-wing extremist coalition”, stand for a “world of cooperation instead of competition” and want to defend the “foundation stones of our hard-fought democracy”.
150,000 people at Heldenplatz
The first Thursday demonstrations took place almost 25 years ago. After the first black-blue coalition was sworn in in February 2000, more than 150,000 people gathered at Vienna’s Heldenplatz to protest against the new ÖVP-FPÖ government and its feared “racism and social cuts”. In the following two years, rallies with thousands of demonstrators took place weekly. At one point, the protesters broke into the Hotel Marriott, where the then FPÖ Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser and ÖVP Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel were scheduled to appear. There were also “resistance readings” in which Elfriede Jelinek, among others, took part.
18 years later the protest was revived. Under the slogan “It’s Thursday again” people took to the streets against Turquoise-Blue under ÖVP Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz and FPÖ Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache from October 2018. Not just in Vienna, but also in cities like Linz or Innsbruck. Thursday’s demonstrations came to a natural end when the Ibiza affair broke up the coalition.
