David Lasar’s family is sadly not unusual among Austria’s Jewish community in having lost several members in the Holocaust.
However, in one respect Lasar stands out — his membership of the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe).
At its foundation, the FPOe was led by two former members of the Waffen SS, so 66-year-old Lasar’s choice of political home might well be considered surprising.
Lasar said that he joined in the late 1990s, as the FPOe was “the only party close to the people, to employees and workers who had been forgotten by the left, while the center-right was the party of capitalism and big business.”
Now as an FPOe lawmaker he said that he has an added reason for throwing his lot in with the party.
“We are fighting tirelessly against anti-Semitism, especially anti-Semitism imported through immigration,” Lasar said.
“We are the only party to be fighting against this, together with our partners in government,” he said, referring to the center-right People’s Party (OeVP) of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
Since entering the coalition government at the end of 2017, the FPOe has made great play of its efforts to foster a rapprochement with the Jewish community, and to establish relations between the party and Israel.
However, the Jewish community has largely kept its distance in the face of repeated scandals suggesting that anti-Semitic attitudes are still present in the party’s milieu.
The Israeli government has maintained an official boycott of all FPOe ministers, including Austrian Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache and Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs Karin Kneissl, who while not an FPOe member herself, was nominated for the post by the party.
Benjamin Hess, copresident of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students, said that “we see no change at all within the FPOe.”
Hess last year confronted Strache in a TV program for having shared an anti-Semitic image on Facebook in 2012.
“It’s easy to say: ‘I’m against anti-Semitism.’ It’s much harder to distance yourself from it in reality,” Hess said.
He and others who are still skeptical of the FPOe point in particular to the party’s deep ties to the “Burschenschaften,” student fraternities known for their strident pan-German nationalism and whose alumni include many high-ranking FPOe politicians.
Strache, who himself flirted with neo-Nazism in his youth, has tried to clean up the party’s image, insisting that it rejects anti-Semitism and expelling some of its more embarrassing members.
He has also made trips to Israel, being welcomed on his last visit in 2016 by junior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Strache also visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Lasar said he has also been to Israel on behalf of the party to foster better relations with the Israeli right and boasted that he has made “excellent contacts.”
“The political calculation is obvious,” said Bernhard Weidinger of the DOeW institute, which researches the Austrian far-right.
When the current government came to power, the European Jewish Congress said that “the Freedom Party cannot use the Jewish community as a fig leaf, and must show tolerance and acceptance toward all communities and minorities,” in an allusion to the FPOe’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The “imported anti-Semitism” that Lasar speaks of has become a favorite theme of Strache’s too, particularly as since 2015 the country has received about 150,000 refugees and asylum seekers, many of them from Muslim countries.
Last month, Strache launched a new think tank with a podium discussion on “Islamic anti-Semitism.”
Ten days later, a prominent FPOe politician sent a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Vienna, saying that “supposed far-right extremist incidents” linked to FPOe members in the past few months were down to “nothing more than agitation by the FPOe’s political opponents.”
Last year, the party’s lead candidate in a regional election, Udo Landbauer, was forced to stand aside after it was revealed that the student fraternity that he belonged to had previously published virulently anti-Semitic songbooks.
He has since returned to politics for the party.
Weidinger pointed to the fact that the party has taken out adverts in publications that have included anti-Semitic content.
All this came against a backdrop of what Austria’s Forum Against Anti-Semitism has said was a doubling of anti-Semitic incidents between 2014 and 2017.
Lasar said that “many Jews” admit to him that “I vote for the FPOe because you are the only ones who are there for us on issues around security and who speak out against radical Islamism.”
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