This is (part of) what European xenophobia looks like

I was expecting radicalized conservatives in Austria to wait until the far-right FPÖ (“Freedom” Party) really ramped up the xenophobia against Ukrainian refugees before they tried to position themselves as the more respectable xenophobes.

But some of the ÖVP may be getting into the game now. At least if this tweet from Laura Sachslehner, the general secretary of the Christian-democratic conservative party, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), is any indication. I guess after they got through six weeks of war pretending to behave, they decided it was time to revert to form.

On a couple FPÖ-oriented websites, which I'l name here but not link, we do seen some poisonous anti-Ukrainian-refugee propaganda: unzensuriert.at and ZurZeit.

The ÖVP and the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) are the country’s two largest parties. But the SPÖ has been the dominant party in Vienna, which is its own federal state, since the end of the First World War. Except for the decade they were banned first by the “Austrofascist” government of 1933-34. Vienna is still (proudly!) known as “Red Vienna.”

The FPÖ is the second-largest party in Vienna, though, so the ÖVP struggles there. Since 2015, the ÖVP nationally under the leadership of former Chancellor Sebastian (“Basti”) Kurz played the anti-refugee theme hard. Kurz left office in 2021 – for the second time – in a cloud of scandal with criminal investigations of him still ongoing. He went to work as basically a political operative for fascist billionaire Peter Thiel.

There are considerable parts of the ÖVP at the state (provincial) level who pushed back against the xenophobic position of the national party during the 2015-16 crisis and the aftermath. But the national party has made it their business to compete with the FPÖ as to which party was the most anti-refugee.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have already come to Austria, many of them in transit to other countries. The political scientist Reinhard Heinisch of the University of Salzburg noted last week on Facebook:

Most of the refugees from Ukraine so far are women and children. In the refugee crisis year of 2015, something like 64% of the refugees in Austria (mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq) were women and children. But it’s common to hear even serious commentators refer to them as having been mostly men.

Laura Sachslehner shared her thoughts on Twiiter April 10:

Her texts say:

Our social system must not be decisive for where people flee. Help on the ground & protection from persecution have always been in the foreground for us as @volkspartei.

This is precisely why Austria provides neighborhood assistance and also supports Ukraine's immediate neighbors, such as Poland and Slovakia.

Translated further from Austrian Xenophobia-Speak, this means:

Lots of “refugees” are really just “migrants,” who are coming to Austria to “lay in the Austrian social hammock.” (This is a variant on the “welfare queen” line all too familiar to Americans. It’s also ridiculous, and the ridiculousness is a big part of the point. “Owning the libs”, as US Republicans would say.)

One Twitter response to Sachslehner’s welfare-queen comment was on point. No, people are not fleeing Ukraine because they are lazy moochers. It’s because there a nasty [bleeping] invasion happening:

Hilfe vor Ort (“help on the ground,” or “help on the spot”) is a buzzword for “Refugees are not our problem, not our problem, not our problem.” Some of the “help on the spot” is actual aid, some of it a bad joke of the owning-the-libs variety. One instance of Sebastian Kurz’ “help on the spot” was at a crisis moment in in an overcrowded and flooded refugee camp in Greece – which in general are a disgrace to the entire EU. Kurz sent a bunch of space heaters that had to be plugged in, and the camp didn’t have the election connections to operate them. They sat in a Greek warehouse unused. “Help on the spot,” Basti-style.

“Ukraine's immediate neighbors”: This is another way of saying, “Refugees are not our problem, not our problem, not our problem.” Poland and Slovakia are direct neighboring countries to Ukraine. Here is the UN’s count as of 04/09/2022 of external Ukrainian refugees and where most of them currently are:

Part of the “not our problem” fantasy talk is that because a lot of Ukrainians live and/or work in Poland, that Poland is in the best position to take care of them. But it’s pure fantasy – cynicism, actually – to pretend that Poland and Slovakia can handle the up to 10 million refugees that could well wind up in EU countries and Moldova this year. Moldova is a small, poor country on Ukraine’s southeastern border, which has part if its own territory (Transnistrian) that have been occupied by Russian troops for decades as one of the post-Soviet “frozen conflicts.” Moldova could even itself be a target of Russian invasion (and is also not a NATO member).

FPÖ chief Herbert Kickl did publicly take this kind of not-our-problem/Hilfe vor Ort position a few days after the Russian invasion began. (FPÖ will keine ukrainischen Flüchtlinge aufnehmen Kurier 28.02.2022; Flüchtlingsbewegung aus der Ukraine: Herbert Kickl erklärt, was es nun braucht! FPÖ TV 03.03.2022) It's not as though the FPÖ isn't positioning itself for anti-refugee stances. Xenophobic politics has been a mainstay of their politics for decades.

Moldova has a population of 2.6 million and in the count shown above 0.4 million refugees. Poland’s population is 38 million, and they are currently at 2.6 million Ukrainian refugees. As a comparison, the total number of refugees coming into the EU in 2015-16 both years combined was 1.4 million. It was considered a catastrophic crisis, and – largely because of the collapse of the center-left and especially center-right parties on the issue – caused a great deal of political turmoil.

Poland already has 2.6 million refugees from the current war, almost twice as many as the entire EU had in 2015-16 that became a traumatic political crisis. The current EU has 448 million people, Britain (which was still an EU member in 2015-16) 67 million.

(Full disclosure here: My spouse is active in a local branch of the ÖVP and also does constructive work with refugees, I’m proud to say.)