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German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have rushed to take advantage of the government crisis in the neighboring Austria for their own political goals, uniting in a crusade against the right-wing populists.
As Austria is reeling from a scandal involving Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache, which put the Alpine nation on a brink of snap elections, in Germany, politicians and officials of almost all political backgrounds snatched at an opportunity to demonize the ‘right-wing populists’ … and teach their neighbors how they should do politics.
“Europe is a union of countries that have decided to cooperate on a basis of common values,” Merkel told journalists in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, answering a question about the situation in Austria. “We are dealing with movements, populist movements that despise those values in many aspects and seek to destroy the Europe of our values, so we have to oppose them.”
Germany’s top diplomat – the Foreign Minister Heiko Maas – was blunt in his assessment, outright calling the right-wing “enemies of freedom.” His colleagues from the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which suffers a historically low level of support, according to the recent polls, promptly followed along with unsolicited advice to Austria’s Chancellor.
“Sebastian Kurz has no other option but to put an end to this government immediately and apologize for entrusting responsibility to the splitters and provocateurs like Strache,” the SPD Secretary General Lars Klingbeil wrote on Twitter. The Social Democrats’ deputy head, Ralf Stegner said that the scandalous video “showed the stupidity and depravity of the right-wing radicals for everyone to see: corrupt, undemocratic, dangerous.”
The only German party that did not vent its anger over the political scandal in Austria was the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD). “The FPO is a close partner of ours,” said the AfD co-chair Joerg, adding that he would not “stab” the allies in the back because of an “isolated issue.”
https://on.rt.com/9upj
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