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Why The Takedown Of Heinz-Christian Strache Will Strengthen The Right
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel published (German) reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid, German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them. He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws. They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung, Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair. Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter. Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately stepped down and the conservatives ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky opines on the case:
Strache’s discussion with the Russian oligarch’s fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view. The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian" puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union’s wealthier member states, was an important member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he’d been the victim of a “political assassination” — a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger’s parade.
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This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week’s election. Salvini’s unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, …
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new far-right block Natteo Salvini will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
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The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties – and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as “populism”. It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people, especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new 'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions, he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes, we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
For all those of you whining about the corruption of Strache, this is how business and politics is done in Austria. Strache was just talking about the FPÖ’s fair share after an election which they would win.
This all starts with Austrian’s Presidential Election of 2016. The FPÖ won the presidential election a couple of years ago in May 2016. After the bell, postal votes overturned it! – postal votes more than 90% in favour of the establishment candidate Van der Bellen. Some constituencies full of Van der Bellen votes turned out to have 148% turn out. There was a court case by the FPÖ about procedure and hinting at ballot falsification. The case was judged by a (non-corrupt but under serious pressure) judge to have enough merit that the elections had to be annulled and the election rerun six months later. Austria went without a president at all for six months!
For six months the mainstream Austrian media campaigned non-stop against the FPÖ and Norbert Hofer. Huge efforts were made for voter turnout (it included huge bussing of potential anti-FPÖ constituencies and bribing pensioners to vote against the FPÖ via parties and cakes). With all of that, Van der Bellen scraped in on 4 December 2016, by 348,231 votes. Despite the non-stop anti-FPÖ propaganda and banging on drums, votes for Hofer’s fell by less than 100,000 (95,993 votes to be exact). It’s just that with six months to prepare the establishment had found enough "dead souls" to win the second round.
In the parliamentary elections of 15 October 2017, the FPÖ were set to win a strong majority in parliament. To defeat the FPÖ and Strache, the conservatives (Völkspartei) were forced to elect a male model non-university graduate 30 year old sex symbol with no work experience outside of politics as party leader. Of course Sebastian Kurz was mainly a figurehead for establishment figures in the venerable Völkspartei. Kurz does have a mind of his own though (I had the opportunity to interact with him personally at a local political discussion group in 2015) and it’s hard to know exactly how much of his policy is dictated to him and how much is off his own bat.
Going back to Austrian corruption, there are enormous sums at stake. There is a long entrenched system of corruption in the establishment parties, the Völkspartei and the SPÖ. Strabag does win most of the government contracts. Favour is regularly granted on quid pro basis. The media landscape is very partisan and mostly for sale. Kurz’s spiritual predecessor as a powerful head of the Völkspartei if not direct predecessor Wolfgang Schüssel was forced to retire from politics in 2011 due to never-ending corruption scandals. Schüssel’s longstanding finance minister Karl-Heinz Grasser was caught carrying bags of cash to Lichtenstein and is still under investigation. If his mother-in-law were not the richest woman in Austria (Swarovski Crystal) and devoted to her daughter (Grasser’s wife), he would long ago have been in jail.
Politically, Grasser knows where a lot of the bodies are buried from the Schlüssel political machine so either he has to be kept out of jail or he may take others down with him. In elite Austrian circles turning informant would be considered unsportsmanlike so there’s an uneasy truce still fought to this day in the courts where Grasser is kept out of jail via procedural methods (detect a pattern) and Grasser doesn’t rat out the others.
Strache’s sin is not planning to use the advantages which accrue to the governing Austrian party but getting caught out talking about it. Strache is something of a lout, not terribly loyal (he was the Brutus who threw Jörg Haider under the bus in 2005 in a palace putsch). He’s a smoker in power who used his power to overturn some very positive anti-smoking laws. But he’s less corrupt than any of his equivalents in the Völkspartei and is only a nose ahead of the his equivalents in the SPÖ. His politics and policies of Austria for Austrians are pretty simple. Hence people vote for these policies.
Here’s a sample of the SPÖ’s wares in the 2010 Vienna elections:
- Zu viel Fremdes tut niemandem gut. (Too many foreigners [or more literally: Too much foreign] does nobody well.)
- Wir bewahren unsere Heimatstadt. Die SPÖ macht sie uns fremd. (We maintain our homeland-city. The SPÖ makes it foreign.)
- Wir glauben an unsere Jugend. Die SPÖ an Zuwanderung. (We believe in our youth. The SPÖ in immigration.)
- Wir schützen freie Frauen. Die SPÖ den Kopftuchzwang (We protect free women. The SPÖ protects the compulsory veil.)
- Mehr Mut für unser Wiener Blut (More courage for our Viennese blood.)
- Uns geht’s um die Wiener (To us, it’s about the Viennese)
The FPÖ has historically been weakest in Vienna but in 2010 they took 27% of the vote in this SPÖ stronghold, their first step in what has been a steady march to power.
Anyone who does not directly have his or her family’s nose in the EU trough at this point knows that the policies espoused by transatlantic puppets like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron push our countries and our continent towards self-destruction. Life in Europe, post-1968 and pre-2013, has been pretty damn good. There’s absolutely no good reason for us to rip up our traditions or turn into a continent of immigrants and mobile job seekers. We instinctively abhor what is happening to our nations. By nature Strache is inclined this way himself (he’s no great thinker) and has the good sense to ride the wave.
Posted by: Uncoy | May 19 2019 22:49 utc | 35
"Somebody" wrote: "You mean FPÖ" about this sentence:
Here’s a sample of the SPÖ’s wares in the 2010 Vienna elections:
Yes, it’s a typo but a significant one considering that most people reading this won’t be familiar with Austrian politics. B, if you could fix that typo, I’d be very grateful. "Somebody" (names which confuse the site should be banned) is trying very hard to make this setup and leak seems as normal and not carefully timed:
The Strache setup certainly took a while – like introducing the woman as related to a rich Russian to FPÖ circles and get them used to her, it also continued afterwards and more will come out. It is unlikely NATO was involved, Russia is big in Austrian business, eliminating FPÖ changes nothing, zilch. AND Austria is not a member of NATO – they are neutral like Switzerland.
Austria is de facto part of NATO via PfP. There are regular attempts to force full membership but the electorate won’t have it. When the EU Commission is finished redoing the demographics of Europe, no doubt they will be successful in pushing Austria into NATO.
"Somebody" sounds like someone in the employ of the EU – at the trough of the usual multi-culti state-subsidised professional NGO crowd.
With FPÖ the problem is systemic. They draw their personell (sic) from reactionary fraternities – ie men ranging from chauvinist to fascist used to drink heavily in male company, building networks to jump the queue for jobs.
Let’s rewrite this one:
With Wall Street the problem is systemic. They draw their personell from men used to drink heavily in male company, building networks to jump the queue for jobs.
or:
With Hollywood the problem is systemic. They draw their personell from men used to drink heavily in male company, building networks to jump the queue for jobs.
or:
With the Republican Party the problem is systemic. They draw their personell from men used to drink heavily in male company, building networks to jump the queue for jobs.
Any group behaves this way. Basically "Somebody" is accusing the the FPÖ party of being human. Tiresome.
More propaganda from "Somebody" (s/he’s been busy in this thread):
Austria has "linguistic and cultural diversity" and the protection of its grown native peoples in its constitution, this means Slovenian, Croatian, Czech, Slovakian, Roma and Hungarian.
The keyword here is "grown native people". Yes the Austrian constitution does protect local ethnic minorities. At no point does it say Austria must become a half-Muslim state overrun by economic migrants from countries and regions that the US has ruined in its endless crusade to allow Israel hegemony over the Middle East. There’s more coming where that came from, for those MoA readers who haven’t figure it out. On the cards in the near future are:
- renewed war on Syria
- war on Lebanon
- war on Iran
- war on Turkey
Those are the last standing whole countries in the Middle East. For the moment, rentier Saudis will be allowed to continue to prance around in their robes subsidising the headchoppers of the day, as Israel/America’s agent from within. Like the Indian tribes who sold out to the American colonists and betrayed other natives, the Saudis day will come too.
We’ve read about great wars which wrecked centuries. We had two of them in the last century. It looks like human nature hasn’t changed, only the tools of war have become ever more dangerous. Post-apocalyptic is looking less like fiction and more like prophecy every day.
Far from requiring growth, if we don’t actively reduce the population there won’t be potable water or clean agriculture. When the world must reduce the population to survive and thrive, the only people who benefit from growth and immigration at this point are international capitalists who could give a toss about long term health of the nations from which they derive their paper wealth. They are already planning their great escape to New Zealand or South America. The need for immigration and growth are the great lie spread by those who own the printing presses and the TV stations to stupefy the population as they destroy nations and eventually the world in a short-sighted quest for temporary financial advantage.
To global capital’s dismay, Europeans continue to resist. The rise of the right wing is in reaction to a real threat to our existence.
"Somebody" is just another agent, duped or conscious, of the selfish and wicked. Strache as I said is a lout. Yet for all his pro-smoking policies and usual petty corruption he’s far less dangerous to the existence of Austria and Austrians than people like "Somebody". It very convenient to many establishment players to try to sideline the FPÖ again. Strache was targeted this time as he’s one of the few European politicians who declined the offer you can’t refuse accepted by traitor Frau Merkel. Like his dead one time mentor Jörg Haider. The charismatic and brilliant Haider died in a mysterious car crash eighteen days after an election where he rose from the political dead to become the fourth faction in the Austrian parliament (Nationalrat) and once again kingmaker.
World subjugation is a blood sport, played one kill at a time.
Posted by: Uncoy | May 20 2019 8:07 utc | 44
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