My knowledge of European current events is limited to what I read about Lily Allen on perezhilton.com and, more recently, the whole Berlusconi/naked young ladies scandal. Yet since moving to Vienna, it's been difficult to ignore the election season - the entire city is covered with candidate billboards and I even got free shots at the bar on Saturday from some guy's campaign (danke!) .
As much as I talk up Austria, the place has some major underlying problems which came to the surface during the elections. Most distressingly, the country - home to the world's third-largest United Nations office - has become increasingly xenophobic. During the election season, conservative candidates attacked Austria's immigration policies and were particularly critical of the country's large Turkish and Balkan communities. And from speaking with Turkish colleagues at work, it's not just political rhetoric - getting service at restaurants and stores and finding housing can be difficult if you're not seen as truly "Austrian."
Today's election results provide a good window into what popular opinion is regarding "outsiders." According to the NYT, Austria's far-right, anti-immigration Freedom Party is expected to take 13% of Parliamentary seats - double the share of the vote it received in the 2004 elections.
You might remember the Freedom Party from the whole Jörg Haider controvery a little under a decade ago. Haider, a Nazi sympathizer, ran on an anti-immigration platform and successfully formed a coalition government with another conservative party in 2000. The party quickly fell out of favor but has recently re-emerged as a force on the national stage. And the strength of the far-right isn't limited to Austria - similar parties in Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands also saw big gains at the polls yesterday. Ultimately, the election results signal an unsettling move toward extremism not just in Austria but across Europe as a whole.
Obama better fix this shit.
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I always tell you, they're just so ungrateful...we saved their asses from fascism 65 years ago and that's how they thank us. Far-right and Coca-Cola Light that tastes like (&?(%
ReplyDeleteNice reportage. They are also having elections here in Mexico City. I too would like to report on how they are going. But, unfortunately, the only thing that I can gather from the billboards is that one party wants to pave roads, while all the other parties... well I'm not sure what they are saying.
ReplyDeleteWhen you have millions of immigrants that have the same ethnic identity and choose to retain their language, religion and their culture, that's not immigration anymore but a demographic occupation. This does not lead to multi-culturalism, it leads to a dual polarization of a country. Behaving like that, the mono-ethnic immigrant group effectively builds a parallel society that it's distinct and eventually on a competitive stance towards the original society.
ReplyDeleteThroughout the history, the moder times included, dual societies have been plagued by violence and social unrest: Lebanon, Bosnia, Norther Ireland, Kashmir and mixed muslim-hindu states in India, recently mixed hindu-christian states in India, muslim nort Nigeria versus south christian Nigeria, ethnic hutu/tuzi conflict in Rwanda, ethnic arab/african conflict in Darfour, ethnic/religious muslim-christian conflicts in south Sudan, tamil(hindu)-singhalese(budhist) in Sri Lanka, christian-muslim conflict in south Fillipines, muslim-budhist in south Thailand, ethnic/religious conlict in Indonesian New Guinea, ethnic conflict in Tibet, ethnic slavic/latin in Republic of Moldova, ethnic/religious conflicts in Caucasus: Ossetia, Ingushetia, Nagorno-Karabah region, Checnya, jewish/arab conflict in palestine, kurdish/turkish and kurdish/arab conflicts in Middle East, inter-religious violence suni/shia in Irak and Lebanon, christian-muslim conflicts in east Timor, ethnic uygur-han conflicts in western China and the list can go on and on.
How can you call extremists the people who just want to put an end to mass immigration to prevent their country, essentially being taken away from them and to stop their society from transforming in this kind of dual society prone to conflict? It's their country after all, they built it generatioin after generation, it's not mine, not yours and it does not belong to people who just want to move their there because of the living standards while they don't give a shit about the set of values that enabled that nation be prosperous in the first place.
Lesley, best wishes and have fun in beautiful Vienna, and, believe me, if the ancestors of your turkish colleagues had conquered it when they tried in 17th century, it would have beed now a shanty town in a temperate climate - no chance for an internship there.
cosmin
Oh Cosmin. Why are you in Physics???
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