Politicians and Jewish community leaders across Austria have called on a prominent politician with Jewish roots to resign after she addressed a right-wing extremist rally Saturday night.
Ursula Stenzel, minister without portfolio for the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Vienna’s city government, joined around 200-300 people on the torchlight parade marking the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when Polish king John III Sobieski defeated the Ottoman army and lifted their siege of Vienna.
This battle is central to the anti-Islam, anti-immigrant rhetoric used by Austria’s far-right Identitarian Movement, which defines contemporary Europe as a war between Christians and Muslims.
Ms Stenzel spoke at the end of the torchlight parade at Karl-Lueger-Platz, named after the notoriously antisemitic former mayor of Vienna.
Though Ms Stenzel is Catholic, she also has Jewish roots via her mother. Her great-grandfather was a rabbi and grandfather a cantor. In a 2006 interview, she said she took with her “the best from both sides” of her Catholic-Jewish upbringing.
Wär hätte vor 37 Jahren gedacht, dass sich Frau Stenzel eines Tages mit einer Fackel in der Hand den Neonazis anschließen wird? Unfassbar... pic.twitter.com/4wYiajZvuR
— Nadine 🐦 #18er (@Rapunzel_1977) September 7, 2019
Previously a journalist, she became an eccentric figure in the centre-right People’s Party before crossing over to the FPÖ in 2015.
In April, she compared leading TV journalist Armin Wolf to a Nazi-era judge.
In a statement, Ms Stenzel claimed she would not have attended if she had known beforehand that members of the Identitarian Movement would also be at Saturday night’s rally.
But Jewish community president Oskar Deutsch said her attendance showed “what kind of person she is.”
Politicians from the Social Democrats as well as the People’s Party also called for her resignation.
Ms Stenzel’s speech brought the FPÖ’s political extremism back into focus, three weeks before Austria’s next general election takes place.
It was the twelfth case of extreme-right activity inside the party since the coalition government it partnered was dissolved in May.
