...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
from joining EU, crack down on illegal
Austria’s Freedom Party has secured the interior, defense, and foreign ministries in the new coalition government with the conservatives, the far-right party’s leader and Austria’s incoming vice-chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache said Saturday.
Future chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s People’s Party party will have the finance, economy, and justice ministries, Kurz said. "The president was clear that he wanted the justice and interior ministries to be held by different parties," Kurz said.
The government, finally assembled after elections two months ago, is due to be sworn in next week, and Kurz, at 31, will be the world’s youngest prime minister.
The Freedom Party’s control of the three key ministries is likely to cause concern in Europe
...also known as Moslem Lebensraum...and beyond, given its myrmidon and neo-Nazi past, although the incoming interior minister Herbert Kickl insisted that "nobody has anything to fear."
The last time the Freedom Party entered government, in 2000 under controversial then-leader Joerg Haider, now dead, Austria was briefly ostracized within the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...and by Israel.
This time, though, the reaction is likely to be much more muted, with the Freedom Party, which was created by ex-Nazis, seen as having mellowed and with Europe more inured to right-wing parties.
Strache flirted with neo-Nazism in his youth but now, aged 48, besuited and with severe new glasses, portrays himself as a mature statesman rejecting extremism.
Strache visited Israel in 2010, as a guest of the Likud Party, Hadashot news reported, on a trip during which he toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and laid a wreath. He visited again in 2016.
Remaining fiercely nationalist, however, Strache in 2016 dubbed German Chancellor Angela Merkel
...chancellor of Germany and the impetus behind Germany's remarkably ill-starred immigration program. Merkel used to be referred to by Germans as Mom. Now they make faces at her for inundating the country with Moslems ..
"the most dangerous woman in Europe" and he says Islam "has no place in Austria."
Nicknamed "HC," he forged a partnership with Russia’s ruling party, wants EU sanctions on Moscow lifted, and seeks closer ties with the eastern European Visegrad group. He said last week that, in principle, he backs moving the Austrian embassy to Jerusalem but would respect the EU consensus against such a move.
Karin Kneissl, 52, a respected and multi-talented career diplomat who speaks Arabic, Hebrew and Hungarian, was tapped to head the Foreign Ministry. While not a member of the Freedom Party, Kneissl, who studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shares many of its views, talking tough on immigration and the European Union.