“We want to have a loud rally today so that we can still be heard in St. Pölten,” said Karin Wilflingseder from the “Platform for a Humane Asylum Policy,” which organized the event.
According to the police, around 500 participants had joined “Love Music, fight Fascism!” gathered on Saturday. The FPÖ Lower Austria criticized the human rights spokesman for the Greens in Vienna, Nikolaus Kunrath, and mentioned the song book affair of top candidate Udo Landbauer’s fraternity Germania and Gottfried Waldhäusl’s Sager in a TV program, according to which Vienna would still be Vienna if the ideas of the FPÖ on the subject asylum would have been implemented. “We are here because of the Jewish community, which has to see how Governor Mikl-Leitner shakes the hand of the Lower Austrian FPÖ that was extended in a Hitler salute,” said Vienna’s SPÖ City Councilor Jürgen Czernohorszky.
Volkshilfe director Erich Fenninger also spoke out once morest a possible right-wing majority. “Once once more Ibiza is just an island. Again there is a party in a government whose proponents deny the Holocaust, make the Hitler salute, sing Nazi songs, cheer anti-Semitic circles, advertise books with Nazi songs, want barbed wire to be put up around people who have fled, racially demeaning students”. He also did not hold back with criticism of the ÖVP, which heaved the FPÖ into the government without need. The SPÖ is behaving “self-destructively” and is currently the “best election helper” for turquoise-blue, Fenninger found.
Because it is also important at the federal level to prevent the FPÖ from participating in the government. Wilflingseder stated that the FPÖ was in danger of becoming the party with the most votes in the next elections. And adds: “I think that’s where we all throw up.” Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and anti-democratic forces would gather in the FPÖ. “Down with the FPÖ,” she shouted. Civil society should ensure a change of direction.
Criticism was also leveled at the ÖVP. Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) would “want to trump Donald Trump when it comes to building border fences,” Czernohorszky commented on his statements that the US border fence to Mexico might serve as a model for the EU. Laura Topütt from the Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism documentation center appealed once morest racism, which had long since become a system and strategy in Austria. Muslim people and refugees were deliberately portrayed as “different” and made scapegoats for political failures by the ÖVP and FPÖ.
Speeches were later given by actor Cornelius Obonya, founder of the Beer Party Marco Pogo and Susanne Scholl from Omas gegen Rechts. Music was provided by protest song contest winner Gina Disobey and Harri Stojka.
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