Kickl doesn't cook with water

He also just cooks with water, one could say after the ORF summer interview about FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl. What he delivered over long stretches was too cheap: Austria is in a bad state, but neither company bankruptcies nor unemployment are exploding, as he claimed. Although the longest economic crisis of the Second Republic is ongoing, the bankruptcy rate is barely above the level of 2019, as the National Bank recently noted. Unemployment is again lower than in past crises. Actually, it's a blessing in disguise, but Kickl doesn't even want to admit that because it would contradict his narrative that the country is going under.

Would things run better under his leadership? He has no viable ideas for budget consolidation. Yes, yes, he would cut back on asylum and minimum security wherever possible, but financially that would bring little. More precisely: Far too little, because he wouldn't put the brakes on pensions. Moreover, he would cut subsidies at one time and increase them at another.

More precisely: The abolition of VAT on basic foodstuffs, which he demands to lower prices, would result in exactly that. Everything that is below the normal rate of 20 percent VAT is considered an indirect subsidy, which alone in this case already has a volume of over seven billion euros.

The budget would therefore not be consolidated, and whether prices would fall would be questionable: It would depend on how much the trade would pass on a VAT exemption to consumers.

Kickl's proposal to look at other countries to see how the state could do this and that more cheaply is meager. From him, who constantly demands to create facts, one could expect concrete proposals. On the other hand: He is in opposition. Why should he act as if he were governing and make himself unpopular?

Kickl's most significant message in the summer interview was the following: In connection with the refugee crisis ten years ago, he declared that a wound had been inflicted "in the Austrian national body."

Again, such a term that was also used in National Socialism. It represents the political understanding of the FPÖ leader: Kickl sees himself as a "people's chancellor" and thus acts as if there is only one people to which he would correspond; in this respect, it is consistent for him to refer to the one people as a "national body."

The unity of "people's chancellor" and "body" also tolerates nothing that deviates. Therefore, Kickl insults dissenters as "traitors to the people" and once puts them on a "wanted list," for foreigners he demands "remigration."

This shows that he does not cook with water, but has very authoritarian ideas that have nothing to do with a democratic constitutional state based on fundamental and freedom rights.

Johannes Huber runs the blog dieSubstanz.at – Analyses and backgrounds on politics

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.