Unofficial politics

The FPÖ makes the world the way it likes it

Haimbuchner (left) - during the election campaign with Kickl - wants to teach journalists "manners" and equates them with Islamists.(Bild: FOTOKERSCHI / KERSCHBAUMMAYR)

Serious media are discredited, their own propaganda is presented as the only truth: The FPÖ, which is preparing to appoint Herbert Kickl as the most controversial chancellor of the Second Republic, is openly threatening to kill off the fourth pillar of democracy. Is the ÖVP playing this game?

Since the new strong 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 savings plans of the blue-black negotiators or about the strange and alarming FPÖ understanding of the media.

"Shit paper", abolition of press subsidies
There is the head of the Vienna Blue Party, Dominik Nepp, who calls the "Standard" a "shitty paper" because it reports on highly questionable regulars' table sayings 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 one of his first interviews to the radio station of the right-wing extremist Upper Austrian Stefan Magnet - once active in the neo-Nazi Bund freier Jugend.

"Under a liberal Chancellor Kickl, some people will learn how to behave again: from journalists to Islamists."

FPOÖ-Chef und LH-Stellvertreter Manfred Haimbuchner

Journalists and Islamists
And last but not least, there is the head of the FPOÖ, Manfred Haimbuchner, who openly proclaimed during the National Council 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.

FPÖ content "unfiltered"
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 to "circulate our things unfiltered", according to Hafenecker.

Threat to democracy
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 like 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.