Politics Unofficial

The FPÖ makes the world the way it likes it

Herbert Kickl (left) and Manfred Haimbuchner wanted to teach journalists "manners".

(Bild: Horst Einöder/Flashpictures)

It's a well-known FPÖ trick: discrediting reputable media and presenting its own propaganda as the only truth. In view of the current negotiations on an FPÖ-ÖVP government, a very special question naturally arises: is the ÖVP playing this game?

Since the new man in the federal ÖVP, Christian Stocker, agreed to coalition negotiations with FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl on January 8, the functionaries of the provincial ÖVP have been in a state of shock. Nobody wants to officially comment on what is probably the most blatant breach of an election promise in the party's history. No one from the local ÖVP ranks has said anything about the austerity plans of the blue-black negotiators, nor about the strange and alarming FPÖ understanding of the media.

Many individual cases
There is the head of the Vienna Blue Party, Dominik Nepp, who calls the "Standard" a "shit paper" because it reports on highly questionable regulars' table comments by high-ranking Freedom Party members. There is FPÖ Secretary General Christian Hafenecker, who wants to cut press funding for unpopular media. There is National Council President Walter Rosenkranz, who gave his first interview to the radio station of right-wing extremist Upper Austrian Stefan Magnet - once active in the neo-Nazi Bund freier Jugend.

Journalist reprimanded
And last but not least, there is the head of the FPOÖ, Manfred Haimbuchner, who openly announced during the national election campaign: "Under a liberal Chancellor Kickl, some people will learn how to behave again: from journalists to Islamists." Haimbuchner then provided a foretaste of what this could mean shortly after the election. In an interim press conference on the second black-blue legislative period in Upper Austria, he reprimanded an impeccable APA journalist by disparaging her question about the atmospheric sensitivities between the ÖVP and FPÖ as "soap opera-like" and accusing her of unprofessionalism.

Party channel FPÖ-TV
The discrediting of serious media, which are committed to objectivity, fact-checking and balance, is compounded by the propaganda that the party spreads via its FPÖ TV. While the format gives the appearance of conventional reporting, it is bluntly used by the Freedom Party, according to Hafenecker, to "put our things into circulation unfiltered".

All of this recently led the renowned media scientist Josef Trappel to the following conclusion: "If a future federal government submits to the FPÖ's media policy ideas, media freedom will be threatened as never before in the Second Republic." It is high time that the provincial ÖVP under Thomas Stelzer dared to come out of hiding and take a stand against this threat to democracy.