Sunday 21 November 2021
Austria’s government alarmed
Neo-Nazis subvert corona protests
In Linz two men set fire to the patrol car after a police check – they apparently want to kill the officers. At the demonstrations against the Corona measures in Vienna, neo-Nazis are heating up the mood. Austria’s interior minister sees the country facing further radicalization.
According to Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP), there is a risk of further radicalization of opponents of the corona measures in Austria. That was his impression due to the controls of the 2G rule and incidents during the demonstration of around 40,000 people on Saturday in Vienna, said Nehammer.
A concrete example of the willingness to use violence is an arson attack on a police car in Linz. The two suspects then admitted that they wanted to kill the two police officers who had previously checked them. “This is a level of radicalization that is in no way acceptable.” There are death threats against the Chancellor and the Minister of Health.
At the demonstration, most people peacefully expressed their displeasure, but it also showed that “well-known neo-Nazis and representatives of the new right-wing extremist scene” were trying to heat up the mood. One of the incidents was the trivialization of the Holocaust, in which demonstrators with a Jewish star marked themselves as “unvaccinated”. In addition, Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg had been compared with the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele. Mengele had killed many Jews through medical experiments during the Nazi regime.
In Austria, the pressure on unvaccinated people is enormous. There is a 3G rule in the workplace, a 2G rule that excludes unvaccinated people from large parts of public life, as well as a lockdown for everyone from Monday. While this measure is expected to end on December 13 for vaccinated and convalescent people, it will then continue to apply for unvaccinated people indefinitely. The country is suffering from a massive corona wave with a seven-day incidence of well over 1,000 cases per 100,000 population.