Vienna’s anti-immigrant party courts Serb immigrants

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Vienna, Austria, is holding municipal elections this weekend and a far-right anti-immigrant party is likely to gain the support of one immigrant group: Serbs. Reporter Jelena Kopanja has the story.

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MARCO WERMAN: Immigration is a hot topic this election season. That’s not just true here, as Americans prepare to go to the polls for next month’s mid-term elections. In Austria, for example, immigration is a top issue ahead of municipal elections in the capital, Vienna. Immigrants make up a third of Vienna’s population, and many candidates have been courting them. That includes candidates from Austria’s far-right, anti-immigrant Freedom Party. Jelena Kopanja is a reporter with Feet in Two Worlds, a project that brings the work of immigrant journalists to public radio. She sent us this report from the Austrian capital.

JELENA KOPANJA:  It’s a Saturday afternoon at Kardinal-Nagl Platz in Vienna’s 3^rd district.  The crowd waits for the arrival of Heinz-Christian Strache. He’s running for mayor as head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, FPOE. Lucija, who’s from Bosnia, is here with her Austrian-born son Mario. They didn’t want to give their last name. In the past, they’ve voted for socialists. But this year, they’re supporting the Freedom Party. Mario says Strache promises lower taxes, higher salaries and better access to subsidized housing.

SPEAKING SERBIAN

MARIO: Strache says that subsidized apartments should go to Austrians and not foreigners who’ve just arrived. Austrians like us who have been here many years, need the housing.

KOPANJA: Considering the party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, FPOE has been quite successful in attracting migrants from the former Yugoslavia. Polls suggest that 27% support the party, especially Serbs, the second largest immigrant group in Austria. Konstantin Dobrilovic is a Serb and a member of the Freedom Party. He says Strache’s opposition to Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 won him over. Dobrilovic says the Freedom Party welcomes “good” immigrants like him. People who abide by European, Christian values.

SPEAKING SERBIAN

KONSTANTIN DOBRILOVIC: Mr. Strache continuously states that he does not see any problems in Serbs as migrants, that they are sufficiently integrated, and that they speak German quite well, that they work and that the city of Vienna could not do without them.

KOPANJA: The suggestion is that other immigrants aren’t fitting in as well, specifically Turks who are Muslims. Dobrilovic says that the Freedom Party’s concerned about what he calls islamization of Vienna. He says the integration of Muslims has not been successful here. Bosnia-born Nedad Memic is editor-in-chief of Kosmo magazine in Vienna. He says the word integration itself has become a loaded term.

NEDAD MEMIC: We are all fed up with this word because nobody knows what integration means actually and everybody is considering integration in their own point of view. If you have the FPOE, for them the integration is actually something like assimilation.

KOPANJA: And then there are economic fears. Bosnia-born political scientist Vedran Dzihic says immigrants who support the Freedom Party worry that new migrants could jeopardize what they’ve gained in their years living in Austria.

SPEAKING SERBIAN

VEDRAN DZIHIC: Those that feel in some way integrated, that they have achieved a certain status have a fear, through Strache’s rhetoric, that they will lose that position, that they are endangered from all those foreigners that could be coming in and who are not as well integrated as they are.

KOPANJA: But not everyone shares those fears. 24-year-old Natascha Stojanovic was born in Vienna and feels at home both here and in Serbia. Her father is a Serb, her mother an Albanian Muslim with some Turkish thrown in.

SPEAKING SERBIAN

NATASCHA STOJANOVIC: I am a crazy mix. In German there’s a saying “neither fish nor meat,” which means you live really in between two worlds. For me it’s very positive. For me it’s an opportunity to be a part of different cultures and different religions. My mother is a Muslim and my father’s a Christian, Orthodox and I live in a Catholic country.

KOPANJA: Stojanovic is the moderator of a Facebook group called Serbs Against Strache – No Thanks. She says it’s her way of telling the world that not all Serbs in Austria support the Freedom party and its anti-immigrant stance. Even if the party is putting out the welcome mat for them. For The World, I’m Jelena Kopanja in Vienna.

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