With the FPÖ predicted to be the big winner in the forthcoming Austrian parliamentary elections at the end of September, the party’s president Herbert Kickl—who was targeted by a militant left-wing video comparing him to Hitler—decided to hit back by filing a complaint.
The video, which has gone viral, was put together on the initiative of the Austrian Democracy platform, which is run by a certain Robert Luschnik, formerly a member of the Green Party and the liberal NEOS party (Neue Österreich und Liberales Forum). Luschnik defended himself by saying that he wanted to carry out “active information work.”
The montage has been circulating for several months now. In response, Kickl announced that this time he was refusing to let the attack go unchallenged, and filed a complaint on the unexpected charge of “minimisation (Verharmlosung) of Nazism.”
It all started with an early statement by Kickl in which he announced that he wanted to become the ‘people’s chancellor’, Volkskanzler in German. The expression has been used in the past to refer to Hitler, even though the official and more common expression was Reichsführer. The clip exploits these terms, gradually transforming Kickl into Hitler on screen.
Kickl already took several legal actions to demand the removal of the video—without success, since it continues to circulate in several versions on the web. This time, he chose a clever and original angle of attack, accusing the clip of contributing to a “trivialisation of Nazi ideology’”—qualified as an offence under Austrian law. For the party’s general secretary, Christian Hafenecker, the content is “tasteless and completely unfounded.”
Kickl bases his action on the Verbotgesetz, a constitutional law dating from 1947 that banned the NSDAP and implemented denazification in Austria. It prohibits the public “denial, minimisation, approval and justification” of National Socialist crimes. The law was strengthened in 2023.
The attack on Kickl has not met with unanimous approval in Austria. The platform’s crude attempt to equate Kickl with Nazism could have the opposite effect, strengthening Kickl and making it impossible to combat the real danger of rising antisemitism in Austria, according to Die Presse.
For the time being, Luschnik’s smear campaign does not appear to have had any effect on the momentum of the FPÖ, which is expected to be in the lead in the forthcoming elections on September 29th.
