The right-wing populist FPÖ has won the parliamentary election in Austria. Their party leader Herbert Kickl has not been stingy with controversial statements in the past. An overview.
Herbert Kickl has achieved the greatest success of his political career: the head of the right-wing populist FPÖ won the most votes in a parliamentary election in Austria for the first time. Read more about this here.
Even in his party’s camp, Kickl is considered to be particularly sharp-tongued: his political rise has not led to him becoming more moderate in his choice of words over the past few years. An overview of the FPÖ party leader’s most controversial and scandalous statements:
Kickl made the statement in 2018 just a few weeks after he became Federal Minister of the Interior. He talked about how he wanted to bring refugees to so-called basic care centers in the future. From his point of view, this doesn’t mean mass accommodation: “It’s just a term, these basic care centers, for an appropriate infrastructure where we manage to keep those who enter the asylum procedure in one place, because it’s our common goal “It must be of interest to come to a corresponding result very, very quickly,” said Kickl in a press conference.
The statements caused so much attention that international media such as the New York Times and the BBC reported on them. He rejected the accusation that Kickl deliberately wanted to draw a parallel to National Socialist concentration camps with the term “concentrated”.
The statement was not made by Kickl himself, but by the then FPÖ chairman Jörg Haider in his speech on political Ash Wednesday 2001. However, the saying was thought up by Kickl, who was working as a campaign strategist and speechwriter for Haider at the time. He also wrote FPÖ slogans such as “More courage for our ‘Viennese blood’ – too much foreignness is no good for anyone.”
The target of the saying was the then president of the Israelite cultural community in Vienna, Ariel Muzicant. Haider was subsequently publicly accused of anti-Semitism and apologized to Muzicant several times. Kickl, on the other hand, said that he had no problems with the statement to date.
At the beginning of 2019, Kickl questioned the European Convention on Human Rights with his statements. The then Interior Minister was previously asked by ORF how he planned to enforce his harsh migration policy if it violated the convention or EU law. Kickl then emphasized that compliance with the rule of law was a matter of course.
However, it is a problem when laws prevent you from doing what you think is currently necessary, Kickl continued. In doing so, he made it clear that, in his view, politicians are also above the law. According to his statements, the social democratic SPÖ demanded the resignation of the then interior minister.
The AfD has officially declared an incompatibility decision with the right-wing extremist ‘Identitarian Movement’ (IB). Officially, members of the movement are not allowed to become members of the party.
However, unofficially there are numerous connections between the IB and the German right-wing populists. It was IB head Martin Sellner who presented his concept of “remigration” to members of the AfD at the well-known meeting in Potsdam. With the FPÖ and Kickl, on the other hand, there is no distance from the “Identitarians”: in 2021 he praised them as an “NGO from the right” in an interview with the Puls24 broadcaster. At that point, the movement had already been classified as right-wing extremist by the Austrian Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
