What is going on in Austria

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Heinz-Christian Strache

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Sebastian Kurz

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These guys sound like hotdog condiments

Kurz is a bad arse chancellor.

More co worker is Austrian. His family still lives there an hour outside Vienna as apple farmers.

Kurz won handedly in 2017 I believe, as the anti immigration candidate. I visited Austria last year everyone I spoke with loves him. 33 yr old dude who we’ll be in that spot for a quite a while.

NYT is reporting holy shite looks like a set up and very much in the same fashion as setting trump up. Intelligence communities are doing op’s on any “far right” party across the globe.

LINK

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Chancellor Sebastian Kurz called snap elections after the country’s far-right vice chancellor resigned over a secretly filmed video from 2017. The video showed Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the far-right Freedom Party promising government contracts to a woman claiming to be a prospective investor and niece of a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir V. Putin. The meeting appears to have been a setup. But it exposed the Freedom Party’s apparent eagerness to do business with allies of Mr. Putin.

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In NYT fashion

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The scandal comes at an important political moment in the European Union. Across the Continent, far-right, populist leaders are campaigning hard before this coming week’s elections for the European Parliament and seem poised to increase their share in the chamber. Many of Europe’s populists share Mr. Putin’s intentions to widen political divisions and weaken Western institutions. Those tactics have involved interfering in democratic campaigns including the United States 2016 elections. And a Russian woman, Maria Butina, was sentenced to 18 months in prison last December after admitting that she had been part of that effort.

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Now Austria is at the center of a battle of ideas between liberal Western democrats and populist forces allied with Mr. Putin, who as a K.G.B. spy based in Communist Germany would go to Austria to ski.

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“Vienna plays a key role for Putin and for the far right,” said Peter Pilz, an independent Austrian lawmaker. “Far-right parties all over Europe have become a sort of fifth column for Russia. In Austria, that fifth column has been in government.”

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he video of Mr. Strache’s meeting was filmed in a villa on the Spanish island of Ibiza three months before the 2017 Austrian elections in which Mr. Kurz led his party to victory. Apparently filmed without Mr. Strache’s knowledge, the footage was obtained and published on Friday by the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, two respected news outlets. The New York Times could not independently verify the contents of the entire video.

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The video’s content suggests that Mr. Strache and the Freedom Party have been acting according to undermine press freedom. At one point in the video, Mr. Strache compared journalists to prostitutes. He also said he would like Austria’s news media landscape to resemble that of neighboring Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban turned the country’s public media into a pro-government propaganda machine while allies have gradually bought up swathes of the private media sector. “We want to build a media landscape like Orban did,” Mr. Strache says in the video, floating the idea of partly privatizing Austria’s public broadcaster and encouraging a suggestion by his Russian counterpart to take over Austria’s most influential tabloid.

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