“Democracy wins!” Austria’s Jewish community president Oskar Deutsch declared over the weekend after the country’s coalition government collapsed after corruption allegations led to Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache’s resignation.
Late on Friday, two German newspapers published a candid video filmed in Ibiza in July 2017 that showed Mr Strache, who leads the Freedom Party (FPÖ), and his chief whip Johann Gudenus offering future state contracts to a woman they believed to be the niece of a Russian oligarch in return for her financial support.
The following day, Mr Strache resigned and Chancellor Sebastian Kurz dissolved his coalition with the far-right to seek new elections.
By Monday evening, his government had collapsed after the remaining Freedom Party ministers resigned and sought to move a vote of no confidence in Mr Kurz in parliament.
Mr Deutsch said recent political developments had confirmed the Jewish community was right in its boycott of FPÖ ministers, instituted when the government was formed in December 2017, and praised the community for remaining united even as party supporters “actively worked against” them.
Incidents of far-right extremism in the FPÖ during their time in office had confirmed the community’s worst fears, Mr Deutsch added, calling on its members to vote for “pro-European parties” in the upcoming elections for the European Parliament on May 26.
Bini Guttmann, president of the Austrian Union of Jewish Students, also welcomed new elections in the wake of the Ibiza tapes, arguing that because of their “connections to neo-Nazis”, the FPÖ “should never have been allowed in the government.” Mr Kurz, he concluded, bore ultimate responsibility for this crisis.
Yet Mr Strache’s resignation speech saw him return to a familiar target — the notorious Israeli policy consultant Tal Silberstein, who was previously a media advisor to the opposition Social Democrats until he was arrested in Israel in 2017 on suspicion of money laundering and corruption.
The FPÖ leader claimed he had been the victim of “Silberstein-style dirty tactics and disinformation campaigns” in recent years and that the Ibiza videos were a political assassination and “commissioned work” worthy of Mr Silberstein himself.
For Mr Deutsch, the resignation speech was a perpetuation of “antisemitic conspiracy theories”. The journalist Karl Pfeifer commented: “The corrupt ethno-nationalist rabble only has one answer: Silberstein.”
But the Chancellor also floated Mr Silberstein’s name — as a possible source of the candid videos. In an interview with the German tabloid Bild, Mr Kurz said the tapes “reminded him of the work of Silberstein”, who “used similar methods all over the world.”
Speaking to Austrian state broadcaster ORF, novelist and political activist Doron Rabinovici warned politicians were playing a “completely irresponsible game” with antisemitic stereotypes, calling the suggestion of Mr Silberstein’s involvement unstatesmanlike.
He noted Mr Kurz had previously called the 2017 election a “referendum on whether we want any Silbersteins in Austria” and that members of the Jewish community aligned to his People’s Party warned him then against such utterances.
The snap election will most likely take place in early or mid-September. Early elections will be held at the same time in the state of Burgenland, where the Social Democrats had been in coalition with the Freedom Party since 2015.
