State elections in Lower Austria: Who is Udo Landbauer? -Politics
Five years ago, Udo Landbauer was the FPÖ’s top candidate in Lower Austria. He was just 31 years old at the time, but already a veteran: brother and father also active in the FPÖ, he himself joined the “Ring of Freedom Youth” as a teenager, and a career followed, as it is, well, in the book. His preliminary march through party institutions ended, sorry for the pun, with the songbook affairdie shortly before the 2018 state elections Vary uncovered. In a hymn book of the Germania fraternity, in which Landbauer was vice chairman, there were texts with anti-Semitic and racist content. Such lines of verse made the rounds at the time: “Then the Jew Ben Gurion stepped into their midst: “Step on the gas, you old Germans, we’ll make the seventh million.”
Landbauer continued despite massive pressure, said “now more than ever”, but did not accept his mandate after the election and suspended his FPÖ membership. But he didn’t want to take responsibility; After all, he didn’t “read the book regularly. When the public prosecutor’s investigations were dropped in mid-2018 with an astonishingly lax justification (the texts were “on the limit of what is permissible”, one cannot be sure that they had been used for propaganda purposes), Landbauer was back immediately, back up .
In the elections in Lower Austria, the FPÖ could get a quarter of the votes
Today the FPÖ in Lower Austria, where elections will be held again this Sunday, is around 25 percent under his leadership. Landbauer is now 36 years old, he is considered the leadership reserve for the FPÖ in the federal government, he gets on well with party leader Herbert Kickl. Both make politics on the extreme right. The high inflation, they say, is solely due to the sanctions against Russia, and condemning the war of aggression never crosses their lips. Human rights are an outdated concept, on the issue of migration they are on “zero immigration, zero tolerance”, pushbacks at the EU’s external borders are completely legitimate.
Interestingly, Landbauer himself has a migration background. His mother is from Iran; she met his father on vacation in the 1970s. The FPÖ politician overcomes the cognitive dissonance between his xenophobic slogans and his Persian mother by realizing that everything is different in his family and that his mother is excellently integrated: “You adapt. You’re not here to take advantage of the state and its people,” he said in an ORF interview.
Austria 2023 – that is, again and again, the return of the FPÖ: In Lower Austria, the Freedom Party could get a quarter of all votes; According to surveys, they are even number one in the federal government.
This column also appears in Austria newsletterThe reporting of the SZ on Austria bundled. Register now for free.