The most shocking detail about yesterdays elections in Vienna are the 15 percent of votes gained by our right wing party FPÖ. I think a healthy democracy can stand about 10% extremism, either from the extrem right or left. What I can’t understand is how is it possible to get 15% of votes (100,780 persons!) with that ugly, aggressive and racist campaign?
It’s just unbelievable…
15% of Vienna are accesible with mainly xenophobic arguments,
15% of Vienna seem to prefer to solve certain issues in the good old manner (“it’s not our fault, somebody else has to be blamed!”),
15% of us don’t seem to be capable of learning from the past (neither recent nor long term).
We simply have to face that 15% of us will remain (dangerously) dumb!
Last thursday our beloved right wing party offcially started their campaign for the upcoming local elections in Vienna. Like every year this convention was held at Viktor-Adler-Markt in the 10th district. Just because of curiosity which people will be appear there and still more interesting which topics will their top-candidate H.C. Strache pick out as their central themes I went there. Not surprising his speech was full of untruths (not to say lies) and absurdities.
One of his major topics, crime, is just ridiculous. I think nobody in Vienna would be scared if he would stop telling people that Vienna is insecure because of black or dark-skinned people in the street and subway. In fact, Vienna is one of the safest cities world wide and lately crime rate actually is decreasing.
He tried to refresh some old phrases of former FPÖ leader Jörg Haider like those subliminal anti-Semitic hints towards the US east-coast (unfortunately nobody in the audience got this jokes right, nobody clapped or laughed). Followed by criticizing the efforts to improve the situation for homosexuals and last but not least some quite crude arguments against immigration and asylum. Then I went home, enough is enough. Apart from that I got pretty angry about the things I just heard, I was wondering how people can vote parties like that. What would be the motivation to give them a vote? Pollsters identify those people as protest voters. Protesting against the current political situation. Or maybe unsatisfied with their personal situation and somebody has to be blamed. Parties like FPÖ always offer some easy targets to blame.
Still it’s incomprehensible, rethinking their agenda only for 5 minutes would show that most of their points (well, probably every single point) are simply, sorry, bullshit.