Austria’s main Jewish body (IKG) will boycott a parliamentary Holocaust commemoration event because of the rise of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), which entered government last month, the IKG’s president said on Thursday.
The Freedom Party, junior coalition partner to Sebastian Kurz’s conservatives, was founded by former Nazis and has repeatedly excluded members in Nazi scandals. It claims it has left its Nazi past behind.
“We do not want anything to do with such people and we do not want to commemorate the people who died in the Shoah with such people,” IKG president Oskar Deutsch said on ORF radio.
“One should think about what kind of people are sitting in a government and what kind of people get voted into a parliament.”
The Freedom Party gained third place with 26 percent of votes in parliamentary elections in October. The Conservative president of parliament, Wolfgang Sobotka, said he could understand the IKG’s behaviour but also felt it was “a pity that some people are not coming.”
Earlier this month, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl of the FPÖ said asylum seekers should be “concentrated” in special centers to help the authorities process their applications swiftly.
Kickl’s wording evoked Nazi-era concentration camps, where Nazis held and killed millions of Jews, political dissenters, disabled people, Roma and Sinti during World War Two.
