Austria’s Welcome to a Party With a Nazi Past

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/opinion/austria-nazi-past-kurz.html

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Austria’s new chancellor has given an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party founded by ex-Nazis key posts in his coalition government, an alarming move that may help define a new normal in Europe.

Chancellor Sebastian Kurz dashed hopes that he and his conservative People’s Party would reject an alliance with the extremist Freedom Party. Instead, Mr. Kurz cut the Freedom Party a generous political bargain.

The pro-European Mr. Kurz handed this party with roots in Austria’s Nazi past the defense portfolio and the powerful posts for the interior and foreign ministries, in exchange for its dropping demands for a referendum on European Union membership.

Austria’s migration policy will now include seizing migrants’ cellphones on entry, stripping migrants of their cash and depriving them of medical confidentiality.

Several countries in the bloc, including Poland and Hungary, are already governed by anti-migrant, right-wing governments. And Italy has taken a harder line on migrants crossing the Mediterranean, working with Libya’s coast guard to return them to Libya — where they are extorted, tortured and enslaved — before they get to Italian soil.

Mr. Kurz wants to go further and accelerate deportations. “Stopping and returning illegal migrants to their countries of origin,” he wrote in Time magazine on Monday, “must become standard procedure.”

That stance is no different from the one taken by the government of President Emmanuel Macron of France, which announced on the same day that it would introduce legislation next year to speed deportations of migrants who do not qualify for asylum.

Much to her credit, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who is struggling to form a coalition government after elections in September left her Christian Democratic Party weakened by voter backlash against her generous migration policy, is steadfastly opposed to the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which came in third, with 13 percent of the vote. But she congratulated Mr. Kurz and said Berlin looked forward to continued cooperation with Vienna.

Ms. Merkel, and everyone else committed to human rights and democracy, should be wary. The return of the far right into Austria’s government is a sign of Europe’s vulnerability to xenophobia and authoritarianism after having failed to address citizens’ concerns about security and economic fairness.

As Pierre Moscovici, European commissioner for economic and financial affairs, warned, “The coalition now in power in Austria should elicit vigilance of democrats committed to European values.”