Turkish citizens living in Austria also voted in the second round with a huge majority for incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdogan – and therefore celebrated his victory loudly on Sunday night. This is now provoking a domestic political controversy over migration and integration. Investigations have been announced by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution for showing the banned “wolf salute”.
According to provisional data from the state news agency Anadolu Ajansi, almost 74% of all Turks in Austria with voting rights voted for Erdogan. The old and new president fared particularly well in Austria in an international comparison. The result for the incumbent was again better than at home in other European countries with large Turkish communities, most notably Germany, where, according to preliminary results, around 67.4 percent voted for Erdogan, France (66.6 per percent), the Netherlands (70.4 percent) and Belgium (74.9 percent). On the other hand, in countries like Great Britain, Sweden or Switzerland, Kilicdaroglu was at the forefront.
Numerous supporters of the Turkish president celebrated the election victory in Vienna late Sunday night, focusing on Reumannplatz in Vienna-Favoriten. Videos on social media showed revelers noisily waving Turkish flags and pictures of Erdogan.
According to a spokesman for the Vienna police, there were motorcades at the spontaneous and therefore unannounced rallies from 8:30 pm around Reumannplatz, which caused major disruptions to traffic. The situation calmed down again around 11:30 pm due to the intervention of those responsible and respective reports. According to the police spokesman, potentially endangered objects such as the house of Ernst Kirchweger – which has been targeted by Turkish hooligans in the past – or embassies were also secured and several hundred revelers were prevented from moving. According to the police, there were also advertisements in accordance with the “law of symbols”, as – as at previous events – the banned “wolf salute” was displayed by individual Erdogan supporters.
The Viennese FPÖ used the rallies as an opportunity to locate a “caliphate” for which the SPÖ and Mayor Michael Ludwig had favored, to ask Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) to step down, and to urge Erdogan supporters to leave for Turkey. The head of the Viennese FPÖ, Dominik Nepp, and the chairman of his favorite district party, Stefan Berger, spoke in a broadcast about “thousands of fanatical men” and a “serious threat to freedom and democracy”, in the face of which the “incompetent ” Minister of the Interior and State Security “completely failed”. FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl practically sounded the same horn word for word, for him “the audacity of the fanatics is a result of the weakness of the SPÖ and the ÖVP and also of decades of neglect on the subject of integration”.
The Minister of the Interior, thus criticized, thanked his officials for their “caution” and announced the investigations of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in relation to the wolf salute: “The democratic rule of law and its laws must be respected by all who live in our country,” explained Karner in a statement to the APA. “This is the basis for peaceful coexistence. The glorification of an extremist ideology by showing the wolf salute clearly contradicts our laws and is consistently persecuted.”
Integration Minister Susanne Raab (ÖVP) explained: “Imported political activism and violence must be condemned in the strongest terms and punished with the full force of the law. Nationalism imported from abroad is the opposite of integration and has no place between us.” For his party colleague General Secretary Christian Stocker, Kickl failed “across the board” during his time as home minister. After all, he had almost two years to “stop such developments”.