Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who also holds the foreign affairs portfolio, said on Monday that Israel will boycott Austria’s far-right ministers, instructing Israeli ministers to work only with lower-ranking officials.
Seeking to cool ties with the Austrian government were officials at the Foreign Ministry, while officials at the Prime Minister’s Office were inclined to accept statements by the far-right Freedom Party that it has broken with its antisemitic roots, political sources said.
The new Austrian government took office Monday following two months of negotiations between Sebastian Kurz, the new chancellor and head of the centre-right People’s Party, and Heinz-Christian Strache, whose Freedom Party came in third in the October election after the People’s Party and Social Democrats.
When Strache’s party joined a coalition government in 2000, Israel recalled its ambassador and downgraded relations. But this time the response had been slow.
A statement released on Monday at the close of discussions between the Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s Office said that “Israel will conduct working relations with civil servants in the ministries now led by Freedom Party ministers …. Israel seeks to stress its responsibility to fight antisemitism and to commemorate the memory of the Holocaust.”
The statement added that Netanyahu “has a direct line of communication with the Austrian chancellor-elect,” and that he has instructed Yuval Rotem, director general of the Foreign Ministry, to craft an official stance on how Israel will conduct its relationship with the new Austrian government.
