Austria’s interior minister has announced plans for mass surveillance of Syrian and Afghan asylum seekers in response to a terrorist attack. The incident, which took place on Saturday, saw a Syrian allegedly stab one person to death and injure five others in Villach. According to police, the man –whose rampage was cut short by another Syrian man who intervened – was a legal resident in Austria and not known to authorities.
Gerhard Karner, known for his hard line on security, said ‘mass checks without cause’ of ‘asylum seekers with Syrian and Afghan backgrounds’ were needed to ensure public safety. He said that because the alleged attacker was unknown to authorities, there was no alternative to indiscriminate checks. The interior ministry later clarified that the proposal would be implemented by monitoring shelters housing foreigners.
This is another example of Europe’s right-wing parties struggling to adapt to the rise of the far right
The proposal is almost certainly a legal non-starter. Openly targeting people because of their race or nationality is probably banned by the Austrian constitution, legal expert Heinz Mayer told Austrian TV. Mass checks of migrants without probable cause would require extensive changes to the constitution and law, he added.
On the other hand, the proposal is a symptom of the mounting frustration in German-speaking countries at the recent spate of terror attacks committed by asylum seekers and refugees. The Villach attack, although only the first fatal one in Austria since 2020, came just two days after an Afghan asylum seeker allegedly drove into a trade union demonstration in neighbouring Germany, killing two people.
In the face of the seemingly constant stream of attacks and apparent powerlessness of the authorities to prevent them, Karner has judged that the public is in the mood for demonstrative toughness – even if it is probably unenforceable. Austria’s fraught political context is playing a role. The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) won the most seats in last year’s federal election, a first for postwar Austria.
The FPÖ’s manifesto included a swathe of hardline anti-refugee measures, including suspending the right to asylum, legalising ‘pushbacks’ at the border and abolishing family reunification. And like its German counterpart, the Alternative for Germany, the FPÖ supports ‘remigration’, a term originally coined by the white nationalist Identitarian movement to refer to mass deportations of non-ethnic Europeans.
Coalition negotiations between the FPÖ and the right-wing People’s Party (ÖVP), to which Karner belongs, collapsed last week, in part over the far right’s demand to hold the interior ministry, responsible for migration and security. Leaks from the negotiations show the parties agreeing on a swathe of anti-migration measures, including preventative detention of ‘dangerous’ asylum seekers and resuming deportations to Syria and Afghanistan. The ÖVP, now negotiating with the centre-left Social Democrats instead, may retain some of the proposals as it seeks to form a government without the FPÖ.
Karner’s comments are in part likely an attempt to get in front of FPÖ criticism of his record as interior minister, a position he has served in since 2021. Current polls suggest that if coalition talks fail and the country goes to a snap election, the FPÖ would win an even more decisive victory while the ÖVP’s share of the vote would fall.
FPÖ politicians immediately seized on the Villach attack to argue that Austria’s immigration policy was failing. Party leader Herbert Kickl, who will likely be chancellor if his party succeeds in forming a government, reiterated his call for zero people to be granted asylum in Austria. Rules that meant that the Villach attacker was legally resident in Austria should be changed, he added. ‘The law should follow politics,’ Kickl said.
The interior minister’s comments are another example of Europe’s right-wing parties struggling to adapt to the rise of the far right. Will the strategy work? The danger for the mainstream right is that if they give up on the principles that separate them from populists – namely, respect for the rule of law and democratic norms – they risk alienating both conservative voters attached to those principles and anti-immigration radicals, who will conclude that they might as well go for the real thing.
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