Can ex-FPÖ leader Strache overcome the five percent hurdle this time? Before the Vienna elections in 2025, he mourns his former colleagues.
Vienna – Heinz-Christian Strache has spoken of a “real blow to my heart” – and that he continues to offer reconciliation to his former FPÖ party. “I think that would be sensible too. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened to date,” he told
Krone-TV
. The conversation was also about the Vienna elections in 2025.
Despite his exclusion from the FPÖ, he was “at peace” with himself and the FPÖ, said Strache. The party kicked him out in December 2019 because of the Ibiza video and an expenses affair. Strache recently surprised everyone with an announcement: He wants to run with “Team HC Strache” in the next state and local council elections in Vienna. Clients on his list are already located in eleven Vienna district representations.
Vienna election 2025: Strache list “practically identical” to FPÖ
What would the capital of Austria expect if Strache is successful in the election? In the conversation, he emphasized that the orientation of “Team HC Strache” was “practically identical” to the FPÖ. The image that Strache found to illustrate what he was fighting against sounded quite populist: In his opinion, in certain districts of Vienna you need a “bulletproof or stab-proof vest” to be able to go shopping for ice cream.
Strache also said in the
Krone
interview that the “slander” against him was “at a peak” during the last Vienna election in 2020 .
“But I also won a total of ten cases.”
Kickl's FPÖ is currently leading the polls in Austria
The current head of the FPÖ is Herbert Kickl, and there are parliamentary elections in the fall. The conservative-green federal government in Vienna recently warned against the former ruling party FPÖ's long-standing Russia-friendliness. Since the end of 2022, the right-wing populists have been in first place in surveys, well ahead of the SPÖ and the conservative Chancellor's Party ÖVP.
Connections between the FPÖ and the extreme right-wing “Identitarians” were already in the public eye. Kickl described the Identitarians in 2021 as a “NGO from the right” with which there is overlap in terms of content.
Sellner said he spoke about “remigration” at a meeting of radical right-wingers in a Potsdam villa in November 2023. What he means by this is that people with foreign roots have to leave the country en masse, including people with a German passport.
The media company
Correctiv
reported on the meeting, which was attended by several AfD members, but also members of the CDU and the very conservative Union of Values. As in Germany, there were large demonstrations against right-wing extremism in Austria at the beginning of the year. According to police reports, around 35,000 demonstrators gathered near the parliament building in Vienna.
(frs)