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Putin’s Austria visit criticized

The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has criticized Russian President Vladimir Putin’s planned one-day visit to Vienna.

Putin's Austria visit criticized
Vladimir Putin. Photo: APA/SERGEI CHIRIKOV

“We know that Putin wants to divide the EU… they always try to when they are driven into a corner,” Bildt said at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg. Contact with Russia is important he said, but it should be the EU’s responsibility and not Austria’s.

Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz defended President Heinz Fischer’s decision to invite Putin – who will arrive on Tuesday. "I think it is legitimate to talk to both sides. We’re not stepping out of line."

Kurz added that for the first time, there was a peace plan, suggested by new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. This was an important step, said Kurz, and the EU completely supported it.

Fischer had been in touch with Poroshenko, Kurz said, and now he wanted to talk to Putin, who was on the other side of the conflict.

But Bildt seemed sceptical that Russia might cooperate in helping to solve the Ukraine crisis and complained that Russia "is conducting a propaganda war with full speed ahead and no signs of them closing the border" to stop arms and militants entering Ukraine.

Economic relations

According to the opposition centre-left Greens EU MP Ulrike Lunacek, the Austrian heads of state and government mostly wanted to talk about economic ties, and not so much about political topics.

For Fischer and Chancellor Werner Faymann, the visit was mostly about "intensifying economic relations with Russia," she said. "The Ukraine crisis is obviously not the main topic."

This was sending the wrong signal, because the Ukraine crisis was about war and peace in Europe, said Lunacek.

The leader of the Greens, Eva Glawischnig, said that it was "disconcerting" that Putin was not going to be available to speak to the Austrian parliament. "Critical dialogue" was obviously not wanted, she added.

Austria wanted to be Europe's main hub for gas from Russia, said Glawischnig. This just maintained and even increased the dependence on Russia for oil and gas.

In addition to the Austrian chancellor, Putin will meet separately in the evening with Swiss federation president Didier Burkhalter, who chairs the OSCE.

The OSCE was instrumental in establishing the ceasefire with the separatists of the Donetsk People's Republic on Monday.

Also likely to come up in discussions is the situation with the eight OSCE military observers, who have been missing and believed abducted by Ukrainian separatists. 

Protests expected

Meanwhile the chief executive of Austrian energy group OMV has called for accelerated negotiations to approve the proposed South Stream gas pipeline. It is unrealistic to think Europe could entirely wean itself off Russian energy supplies, Gerhard Roiss said.

During Putin’s visit OMV and Russian partner Gazprom are expected to sign a contract on bringing the South Stream gas pipeline to Austria.

"A third of our gas comes from Russia, in some regions even 100 percent," Roiss told the WirtschaftsBlatt newspaper.

The South Stream pipeline would bring Russian gas to Europe without having to pass through Ukraine, which has been locked in a violent stand-off with Russia after Ukraine's pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich was ousted.

Protests against Putin’s visit are expected in Vienna on Tuesday.

A group called Euromaidan Wache Berlin has called for a demonstration of all nationalities to gather outside the Hofburg, in front of the president’s office at 1pm, and another group has organized a ‘rainbow’ march to protest against Russia’s anti-gay stance which will gather at Schwarzenbergplatz at 4.30pm.

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2024 EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

ANALYSIS: Why the far right in Europe still faces hurdles in quest for power

Far-right parties are scoring ever higher in elections across Europe, but experts say hurdles remain to the movements making a concerted push for power.

ANALYSIS: Why the far right in Europe still faces hurdles in quest for power

How high the wave goes will largely depend on the response from traditional conservative and centre-right parties, outfits often balancing efforts to cling on to their electoral turf while trying to form workable governing coalitions.

In the past, far-right parties could be kept beyond the pale on two conditions: voters saw them as dangerous to democracy, and their election results remained relatively marginal at up to 15 percent, said Gilles Ivaldi of France’s Sciences Po university.

But with much of the far right moderating anti-EU and anti-migrant rhetoric, “it’s more difficult to maintain a quarantine when you have a party that people think is pretty much like the others,” he added.

Listen to the team from The Local discussing the European elections in the latest episode of the Talking France podcast – download here or listen on the link below

What’s more, such parties are scoring much higher at the ballot box than in past decades.

Their electoral performance has made Brothers of Italy chief Giorgia Meloni prime minister of Italy and propelled Geert Wilders’s PVV party to the threshold of power in the Netherlands.

Some regions of Spain and Germany appear ungovernable without inviting in the Vox or Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties, while Portugal’s Chega is poised to play kingmaker following Sunday’s national elections.

Such successes are founded on “the build-up of successive crises” generating “successive layers of resentment” at those in power since the last European Parliament election in 2019, Ivaldi said.

On top of the years-long fallout from the 2008 financial crash and the mid-2010s refugee crisis have come the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine “with all the social and economic ramifications… around purchasing power, economic crisis and insecurity,” he added.

Where in the past Europe’s major parties on the left and right battled for the centre ground, “there are now pockets of voters who reward being radical, mostly on the right,” said Ignacio Molina, an analyst at Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute.

Ivaldi pointed to a “paradox” that even as populations become more tolerant overall, voters are placing a higher political priority on issues like immigration “in the context of the crisis in the economy and purchasing power”.

When centre-right politicians respond, they often “take up the themes of the far right… legitimising their ideas. And as is often said, voters prefer the original to the copy”.

OPINION: European elections are more than a poll on Putin

In France, the National Rally crowed of an “ideological victory” as it backed a hardline immigration bill that centrist President Emmanuel Macron thrashed out with opposition conservatives and passed in January.

Riding high in the polls, the party hopes to install its figurehead Marine Le Pen in the Elysée palace following the 2027 presidential vote.

Radical parties’ advances have been crimped in places by lingering political taboos.

In Stockholm, the Sweden Democrats support the centre-right government in a confidence and supply arrangement – despite being the largest party on their side of the chamber as other parties excluded ruling with them during the 2022 election campaign.

Since Wilders’ November election victory in the Netherlands, his legacy of anti-Islam rhetoric and calls for a referendum on quitting the EU have dragged out coalition talks with prospective partners, including the centre-right VVD and the anti-corruption New Social Contract.

“Wilders forged an identity for himself as someone opposed to moderate compromises,” Molina said.

Striking deals with opponents is “difficult for him, as well as for others to accept him as a valid counterparty.”

Late on Wednesday, Wilders acknowledged that he did not have the support from other parties to himself move into the Catshuis – the prime minister’s official residence in The Hague.

Media reports suggest the talks could instead produce a technocratic government.

Gains for the far right at the June European Parliament election could tempt centre-right parties towards an alliance in Brussels, Ivaldi said.

“That would mean toughening up migration policy and above all going into reverse on climate” issues, given the radicals’ dislike of anti-emissions policies.

Further into the future, far-right progress in national elections could change the balance of power in the European Council – the other elected policymaking pillar in the EU.

“This is really the heart of European power,” Ivaldi said.

More far-right members alongside Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orban “would mean a huge number of blocking factors on major questions, immigration, the climate and of course support for Ukraine”.

And while far-right rhetoric on dismantling the EU itself has cooled, “I don’t think they’ve really changed their minds”.

But “they saw that their hardest eurosceptic positions weren’t acceptable to the population,” Ivaldi said.

Many – especially in the Identity and Democracy (ID) group – still hope for “a much more intergovernmental model, more like the former European Community than a European Union, bringing back national aims and interests”.

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