Austrian conservatives divided by migration rhetoric
Austria took in roughly 1% percent of its population in asylum seekers in 2015 during Europe’s migration crisis
Vienna — The head of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party stuck to his guns on Wednesday over a racially charged claim that Austrians risk becoming a minority in their own country, straining relations in the ruling coalition ahead of May’s European elections. Last week, Freedom Party leader and Austrian vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said his party was fighting against “population exchange”. “These terms that you mention, the Freedom Party of Austria has always used them, for decades,” Strache told a news conference when asked about his comment. “Many citizens rightly say these are political decisions — the extent to which one wants to continue to allow immigration on a massive scale, the extent to which demographic development then leads to a situation where an ancestral population becomes a minority, and many do not want that,” Strache said. About 16% of Austria’s population has foreign citizenship, national statistics office data for 2018 shows, up from 10% a decade earl...
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