VIENNA – On April 27, 1945, eleven days before the capitulation of Nazi Germany, representatives of three main Austrian parties – the Social Democrats, the conservative Christian Socials, and the Communists – met at Vienna’s city hall in order to officially proclaim the end of the Anschluss (Austria’s annexation to the Third Reich), the re-establishment of an independent Austria and the foundation of a second democratic Austrian republic.
It would take Austria 10 more years to regain its full sovereignty in 1955. In the summer of 1945, Austria and its capital were divided between its four new occupiers – the Soviet Union, the US, Britain, and France, who controlled the country and supervised its unsuccessful denazification and reconstruction.
At the time, Vienna was almost a “city without Jews,” as per the title of the almost prophetic novel published by a Jewish Viennese writer Hugo Bettauer in 1922. On the eve of the Anschluss – the 1938 unification of Austria with Germany via annexation by Adolf Hitler – some 170,000 Jews plus 80,000 people of mixed Jewish-Christian background lived in Vienna. While many of them managed to immigrate abroad, over 60,000 were murdered in concentration and extermination camps. Only around 1,350 Jews survived the Holocaust in Vienna itself, mainly living in hiding as “U-Boote” – from the German word for submarine.
Now eighty years later, while Austria celebrates its rebirth as an independent democracy, the inhabitants of Vienna will elect a new administration on Sunday. Since the end of World War II, Vienna has held the status of a “Land,” one of nine Austrian federal states. With its 2.03-million population, more than a fifth of Austria’s total, the election in Vienna is considered a political event with a national dimension – despite the fact that in the last eight decades, Vienna has been constantly ruled by the Social Democrats.
From 1945 till 1987, the Social Democrats won an absolute majority, with one exception – in 1949, they won with “only” 49.9%. However, only twice since the end of WWII did they get less than 40% of the votes. According to recent polls, in today’s election, the Viennese Social Democrats could register their lowest result since 1945 – 38.4%.
THE SECOND political force in the new Viennese Council will be the far-Right Freedom Party of Austria, FPO, which is expected to win over 20% of the votes, almost tripling its electoral result of the 2020 election (7.1%) and becoming again, for the fifth time since 1996, the main opposition party in the council.
FPO wins big in the European elections last year
IN 2024, for the first time in the history of the Austrian Second Republic, the FPO won the national and European elections but was kept away from power by the other parties. The formation of a new federal government without the participation of the FPO was instrumental for this party in regaining popularity among Viennese voters, mainly in the middle and lower classes of the capital’s population – the traditional electorate of the Social Democrats, who are now part of the federal ruling coalition.
They and the other parties of this coalition – the conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP) and Liberals (NEOS), are presented by the FPO’s leaders as the Einheitspartei (Unity Party, referring to the ruling party in former communist regimes) or as “those above,” who are not concerned by the people’s interests or choices.
The serving mayor of Vienna, 64-year-old Michael Ludwig, who has been in this post since 2018, is accused by his rival from the FPO, 43-year-old Dominik Nepp, of spending over 700 million euros annually on social support to immigrants instead of assisting needy Austrian citizens living in the city. Campaign posters of Nepp all over Vienna were covered by his political opponents with Nazi swastikas or Hitler’s mustache. Due to their vocal anti-immigration stance, Nepp and his party are labeled by their rival as “racist” and “xenophobic.”
The leadership of the local Jewish community refers to members of the FPO as “cellar Nazis” and sticks to its position of totally boycotting this party. However, a growing number of Viennese Jews vote for the FPO, seen as the only bulwark against the growing antisemitism of Muslim immigrants and left-wing groups and individuals.
ACCORDING TO a report released last week by the Austrian Jewish community, in 2024, a record number of 1,520 antisemitic incidents was registered, an increase of almost a third (32.5%) compared to 2023.
The actual number of antisemitic incidents is believed to be even higher, as many are not reported. Almost 30% of the registered incidents have a Muslim background, almost 25% are connected to the Left, and only around 15% are coming from the extreme Right. This report shows clearly that 80 years after WWII, the growing Jewish community of Vienna (the number of Jews living today in the Austrian capital is estimated between 10,000 and 12,000) is confronting a new type of antisemitism.
Another reason for the growing Jewish support for the FPO is the pro-Israeli position of Nepp and other members of his list, such as Leo Lugner and Maximilian Krauss. Shortly after the massacre of October 7, 2023, Nepp and Krauss were thrown out of a taxi by its driver because they criticized illegal pro-Palestinian demonstrations and expressed pro-Israeli opinions.
However, the same politicians have been courting the Turkish community in Vienna, considered as very loyal to Turkey’s Islamist and autocratic president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is radically anti-Israeli.
The FPO is not the only party that is trying to seduce the 30,000 voters of Turkish origin in Vienna. Mayor Ludwig was accused of not siding in solidarity with the arrested Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a leader of the opposition to Erdogan, in order not to lose the Turkish electorate of Vienna. A Turkish party identified with Erdogan and his regime, named the Social Austria of the Future (SOZ – “promise” in Turkish), is also participating in the Viennese elections but is unlikely to pass the threshold allowing representation in the city council.
