VIENNA, Jan 3 (Reuters) – Swiss prosecutors said on Saturday they have placed under criminal investigation the two managers of a bar where a blaze on New Year’s Day killed at least 40 people.
The offences they are suspected of having committed are homicide by negligence, causing bodily harm by negligence and arson by negligence, the prosecutors’ office in the canton of Valais said in a statement.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; editing by Jason Neely)
DUKOVANY NUCLEAR PLANT, Czech Republic (AP) — The eight huge cooling towers of the Dukovany power plant overlook a construction site for two more reactors as the Czech Republic pushes ahead with plans to expand its reliance on nuclear energy.
Mobile drilling rigs have been extracting samples 140 meters below ground for a geological survey to make sure the site is suitable for a $19 billion project as part of the expansion that should eventually at least double the country’s nuclear output and cement its place among Europe’s most nuclear-dependent nations.
South Korea’s KHNP beat France’s EDF in a tender to construct a new plant whose two reactors will have an output of over 1,000 megawatts each. After becoming operational in the second half 2030s, they will complement Dukovany’s four 512-MW reactors that date from the 1980s.
The KHNP deal gives the Czechs an option to have two more units built at the other nuclear plant in Temelín, which currently has two 1,000-megawatt reactors.
“Nuclear will generate between 50% and 60% around 2050 in the Czech Republic, or maybe slightly more,” Petr Závodský, chief executive of the Dukovany project, told The Associated Press in an interview.
The nuclear expansion is needed to help the country wean itself off fossil fuels, secure steady and reliable supplies at a reasonable price, meet low emission requirements and enable robust demand for electricity expected in the coming years to power data centers and electric cars, Závodský said.
Europe’s nuclear revival
The Czech expansion comes at a time when surging energy demand and looming deadlines by countries and companies to sharply cut carbon pollution are helping to revive interest in nuclear technology. While nuclear power does produce waste, it does not produce greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.
Belgium and Sweden recently scrapped plans to phase out nuclear power. Denmark and Italy are reconsidering its use, while Poland is set to join a club of 12 nuclear-friendly nations in the European Union after signing a deal with U.S.-based Westinghouse to build three nuclear units.
The EU generated 24% of nuclear electricity in 2024.
CEZ, the dominant Czech power company in which the government holds a 70% stake, and Britain’s Rolls-Royce SMR have agreed on a strategic partnership to develop and deploy small modular nuclear reactors.
Money matters
The cost of the Dukovany project is estimated at over $19 billion, with the government agreeing to acquire an 80% majority in the new plant. The government will secure a loan for the new units that CEZ will repay over 30 years. The state will also guarantee a stable income from the electricity production for CEZ for 40 years. Approval is expected to be granted by the EU, which aims to become “climate-neutral” by 2050.
“We’re in a good position to argue that we won’t be able to do without new nuclear units,” Závodský said. “Today, we get some 40% electricity from nuclear, but we also currently get another 40% from coal. It’s clear we have to replace the coal.”
Uncertainty over financing has caused a significant delay in the nuclear expansion. In 2014, CEZ canceled a tender to build two reactors at the existing Temelin nuclear plant after the government refused to provide financial guarantees.
Russia’s energy giant Rosatom and China’s CNG were excluded from the Dukovany tender on security grounds following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
CEZ signed a deal wit h Westinghouse and France’s Framatome to supply nuclear fuel for its two nuclear plants, eliminating the country’s dependence on Russia. The contract with KHNP secures fuel supplies for 10 years.
Opposition
While atomic energy enjoys public support, skeptical voices can be heard at home and abroad.
The Friends of the Earth say it is too costly and the money could be better used for improving the industry. The country also still does not have a permanent storage for spent fuel.
The Dukovany and Temelín plants are located near the border with Austria, which abandoned nuclear energy after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear explosion. In 2000, a dispute over the Temelín plant resulted in a political crisis and blocked border crossings for weeks.
FRANKFURT (Reuters) -For years, it was a common occurrence: Dutch bandits would drive to Germany and in the dead of night blow up ATMs, grab cash and speed back home on the Autobahn.
Now, a crackdown is bearing fruit.
ATM attacks have dropped to 115 so far this year, less than a quarter of their peak of more than one a day – 496 – in 2022, according to German police data provided to Reuters.
The spree of explosions has terrorized residents throughout Germany, where – in contrast to other countries – cash remains popular and ATMs are often built directly beneath apartments and in pedestrian zones. The damage has amounted to more than 400 million euros ($466.48 million) since 2020.
“The threat level in Germany remains high, particularly in light of the use … of extremely unstable explosives,” according to a September report by Germany’s top crime-fighters at the federal criminal police, or BKA.
Now the gangs are driving a bit further to Austria, where using cash is still widespread. Attacks in Austria have doubled this year in what the BKA told Reuters was likely “a squeezing-out effect from Germany”. Dutch police have suspected hundreds of men are responsible, working in ever-evolving groups as new recruits replace those caught.
GERMANS STILL LOVE TO USE CASH
Underscoring the shift to Austria, prosecutors said a Dutchman who stole 220,000 euros from cash machines near Frankfurt in 2023 blew up ATMs in Vienna earlier this year, getting away with 89,000 euros in booty and causing 1.5 million euros in damage.
The person was taken into custody on a European arrest warrant and is awaiting trial.
Over the years, this modern twist on the old-fashioned bank heist arose out of two distinctly German factors, investigators say.
First, Germany is a wealthy nation whose residents love to use cash for purchases, meaning ATMs are aplenty. And second, Germany’s famous highway network makes for a quick getaway.
German banks have also invested more than 300 million euros in security in recent years, according to the most recent figures from Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft, an umbrella group for financial institutions, a drop in the ocean for a sector where profits collectively top 50 billion euros annually.
The measures include mechanisms that blow a thick fog when machines are tampered with or emit dyes that render bills unusable. Many banks now lock lobbies around ATMs at night.
The thefts are less sophisticated than many online scams, where law enforcement in Germany and across the globe are battling a surge.
Last week, Germany announced arrests after a years-long probe of fraudsters who – with the help of German payment providers, sham websites and fictitious companies – stole more than 300 million euros from people in 193 countries.
CASES FALL IN GERMANY, RISE IN AUSTRIA
Cases fell this year in all but three of Germany’s 16 states, according to police statistics.
The state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which borders the Netherlands, was one of the hardest hit in 2022 with 182 attacks. So far this year, they are down to just 25.
Despite the decline, collateral damage is still significant, police there pointed out, with one attack in January near Cologne causing 1.8 million euros in damage.
Police credit cooperation with Dutch investigators to locate and nab suspects. The majority of culprits have been Dutch, but some are German, French and Moldovan. Dutch police did not respond to questions from Reuters but in the past have acknowledged the trend.
Police in the state of Hesse, home to Germany’s banking capital Frankfurt, created a tool that generates a probability forecast of an ATM getting hit, based on make, location and other variables.
Last week, Germany’s parliament voted to increase prison sentences for such attacks.
In Austria, cases have risen to 29 so far this year, up from 13 in 2024, according to figures from the interior ministry, which said they first detected the Dutch gangs in 2023.
Austrians have the highest preference for paying in cash in the euro zone, a 2024 European Central Bank study found, meaning plenty of ATMs.
Police there said they are cooperating closely with the police in Germany and the Netherlands.
(Reporting by Tom Sims; Editing by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes and Andrew Cawthorne)
VIENNA — On their 30th wedding anniversary, the couple from Mexico were determined to fulfill a long-deferred aspiration: a visit to this storied former Hapsburg capital. And they didn’t come just to catch an opera and savor the Sachertorte.
“We always wanted to see el penacho de Moctezuma,” said Gema Vargas, referring to the feathered headdress widely attributed to the legendary Aztec emperor. “It’s much more beautiful than we imagined.”
But, she added: “It should be in Mexico.”
For more than a century, Mexican officials have called the penacho a cultural touchstone and sought its return from Austria — despite no evidence that Moctezuma actually wore it. Austrian officials insist the brittle object is too delicate to move from its perch in Vienna’s renowned Weltmuseum.
Despite its lore and beauty, the penacho suffers from a case of contested identity: In Austria, it is a treasured possession of the state. In Mexico, it remains a marker of national identity.
“One has to think of el penacho in two different ways,” said Miruna Achim, professor at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. “It’s a historical artifact. But it’s also a symbol — a highly politicized symbol.”
From its display case in the museum’s “Stories from Mesoamerica” hall, the iridescent plumage shimmers like a rainbow encased in glass, a tropical interloper to these northern climes.
The museum gift shop does a brisk sale in penacho-themed books, postcards, pillboxes, scarves and the like.
The penacho’s formal title — “Quetzal Feather Headdress” — understates the grandeur of a one-of-a-kind piece with a back story stretching back more than half a millennium.
Visitors record Instagram moments in front of the almost 6-by-4-foot palette of dazzling hues — the product of hundreds of feathers from the long-tailed quetzal bird, interwoven with plumes from other species and gold ornaments. The anonymous artisans painstakingly sewed the feathers onto a net grid, stabilized with thin wooden rods.
The intricate ensemble, weighing in at less than 4 pounds, somehow survived the Spanish conquest, a perilous ocean crossing and two centuries of musty anonymity in a Tirolean castle.
The first recorded mention of the “Quetzal Feather Headdress” was in a late 16th century text.
(Félix Márquez / For The Times)
The penacho, experts say, probably dates from the early 16th century, about the time when much of current-day Spain became part of the Hapsburg empire. But there is no record of who made it and, above all, how and when it ended up in Austria.
Its first recorded mention, according to an authorized history, appears in a 1596 inventory of the “Chamber of Art and Wonders” of Archduke Ferdinand at the Ambras Castle in Innsbruck. The ledger notes “a Moorish hat of long, beautiful, gleaming, shining greenish and golden feathers … decorated with golden rosettes and discs, [and] on the forehead a solid gold beak.”
Later appraisals adduced that the enigmatic piece was an apron, a garment or a military banner, before analysts in 20th century Vienna agreed: It was a headdress. By then, however, the golden beak had long vanished and its original, three-dimensional shape had folded into its current fan-like form.
The penacho, experts say, was likely among the Mexican booty that the conquering Spanish dispatched back across the Atlantic. It was an era when “curiosities” from the newly “discovered” Americas transfixed Europe. The splendor of the pieces stunned even worldly observers like Albrecht Durer, the Renaissance master.
In his 2021 book, “Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest,” Fernando Cervantes, a British-based Mexican historian, cites Durer’s 1520 journal entry after viewing a treasure horde dispatched to Carlos V from Hernán Cortés. The Spaniard’s forces would overthrow Tenochtitlán, capital of the Moctezuma’s Aztec empire.
“All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things,” the German artist wrote of Cortés’ plunder. “For I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marveled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands.”
To this day, Cortés and Moctezuma remain figures of both adulation and disdain, recalled in operas, plays, books and films and TV series.
With the passage of centuries, the Eurocentric accounts that depicted Cortés as a heroic “white savior” and Moctezuma as a cowardly heathen have been eclipsed. These days, Mexican leaders and many others label Cortés as barbarous — even genocidal — while Moctezuma often gets a pass as a righteous leader caught in the headwinds of history.
Ultimately, it was Cortés’ ruthlessness — his forces took Moctezuma prisoner and held him as a hostage — that helped doom Tenochtitlán. Moctezuma died in custody under circumstances that remain disputed.
“There’s no question that Cortés played his cards very well,” said Cervantes, an associate professor at the University of Bristol in England. “He knew nobody was going to do anything to him if it wasn’t ordered by Moctezuma.”
Dancers perform an offering during the “Veintena de Teotleco,” an Aztec ceremony held in Mexico City’s Zócalo, on Tuesday. The ritual celebrates the symbolic return of the deities to the center of the universe.
(Félix Márquez / For The Times)
In the Mesoamerican world, feather work was highly esteemed, not only adorning headpieces but also clothing, weapons and other accessories typically associated with rulers, gods and warriors. Certain feathers, it is said, had more value than gold.
Of special demand was the glittering plumage of the quetzal, a lustrous creature native to southern Mexico and Central America. This denizen of the cloud forests shares pedigree with a fabled deity: Quetzalcoatl, the “Feathered Serpent.”
Today, the penacho on display in Vienna is the only surviving feathered headdress among the multitudes that once proliferated in the region.
For many of the growing number of Mexican visitors to the Weltmuseum — more than 25,000 have come this year, a record — viewing the penacho becomes something of a spiritual experience. It is much more profound, many say, than seeing the replica at the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City.
“To stand in front of an object that carries such historical significance made me feel a profound connection to my roots,” said Samantha Lara, 31, a Mexican physiotherapist who was visiting with her family. “It was a reminder of the grandeur of our culture and the pride of being Mexican.”
The allure of the penacho has long resonated among Mexico’s political elite. Some launched quixotic campaigns to get it.
A reproduction of the mural “Encounter Between Moctezuma and Cortes” by Juan Correa, depicting the first meeting between the Aztec ruler and Spanish conquistadors, is displayed Tuesday in Mexico City.
(Félix Márquez / For The Times)
The first was none other than Maximilian, the ill-fated Hapsburg royal, who, with French military backing, was installed as “emperor” of Mexico in 1864. In Maximilian’s view, the penacho “would have afforded him the badges of rulership and presented him as an heir to the Aztec emperors in the eyes of his subjects,” Achim wrote in West 86th, a cultural journal.
But Maximilian’s older sibling, Franz Joseph I, the Austrian emperor, balked at relinquishing the headdress.
Ultimately, Maximilian never shed the stigma of being a foreign interloper. In 1867, as Paris withdrew support and Washington backed the nationalist cause, Maximilian drew his final breath before a Mexican firing squad.
Taking up the penacho cause in the 21st century was former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an avid amateur historian.
The then-president dispatched his wife — an academic of German ancestry — to Vienna on what he acknowledged was a “mission impossible”: to persuade Austria’s leaders to lend the headdress to Mexico for a one-year exhibition in 2021 marking the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlán.
In return, Mexico offered to ship to Austria various objects from Maximilian’s ill-fated reign, including a gilded carriage in which he and his wife, Carlota, tooled around the capital.
Predictably, Vienna said no. The Mexican leader lashed out at his Austrian counterpart as being “arrogant” and “bossy.” López Obrador’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, has also called for the return of the penacho, but in low-key fashion.
The protracted controversy about where the headdress belongs highlights a global debate about cultural appropriation. Curators in Europe and the United States face pressures to repatriate items to Latin America, Africa and elsewhere. Many illustrious institutions, among them the Getty in Los Angeles, have returned works acquired under questionable circumstances.
“We are not against restitution,” Claudia Banz, director of Vienna’s Weltmuseum, said in an interview. “We have to face the fact that big parts of collections of ethnological museums have been, let’s say, looted. … But, on the other hand, restitution is really complex. … It’s not just about giving the objects back and then it’s done.”
A visitor observes a reproduction of the Huei Tzompantli at the Templo Mayor Museum in Mexico City.
(Félix Márquez / For The Times)
In 2012, a commission of Austrian and Mexican experts completed an extensive restoration of the heavily damaged penacho, ravaged by time, insect depredation and other factors. The binational brain trust’s conclusion? El penacho was too fragile to be moved.
Mexican activists accuse Austria of concealing its real motive — profit — and note that the penacho is among the Weltmuseum’s most popular attractions. Critics demand that Mexican lawmakers be more proactive in pushing for the return of the “crown” — the title promoted by Xokonoschtletl Gómora, a septuagenarian Mexican dancer, author and lecturer who has long been the face of the bring-back-el-penacho movement.
“The crown gives a huge amount of prestige to the museum, draws a lot of visitors and makes a lot of money,” said the indefatigable Gómora, who has spent more than 40 years organizing penacho rallies in Austria and Mexico. “Saying it can’t be transported is just an excuse. If mummies from ancient Egypt can be moved across continents, why not this?”
Gómora’s passion has inspired a new generation of penacho militants. In 2022, a group of activists — including Mexicans and Europeans — hacked the Weltmuseum’s hand-held audio guides and inserted a fiery harangue from Gómora.
Ricardo Ozelotzin, center, performs with fellow dancers during the “Veintena de Teotleco.”
(Félix Márquez / For The Times)
“For the Europeans, el penacho is beautiful, ancient and, principally, exotic,” Gómora’s recorded message informed museum-goers, in a stark departure from anodyne guide-speak. “But for us, the Aztecs, this crown carries the force, power and knowledge of the sovereign Moctezuma. … It means a lot more than history narrated by an invader.”
Among the hack’s organizers was Sebastián Arrechedera, a Venezuelan Mexican filmmaker who has produced and directed a documentary about the hack episode. Organizers are planning a Dec. 12 opening in Los Angeles before the film hits the festival circuit.
The penacho, said Arrechedera, “has a certain magic, an energy, a vibe that you can feel.”
Last month, Gómora and allies returned to the Weltmuseum, this time to unveil a high-tech container crafted by a German vibration engineer. The crate can safely transport the headdress, the activists asserted.
Museum authorities dismissed the container design as flawed.
“It’s a difficult and complex matter — and, above all, an ethical one,” said Banz, the Weltmuseum director. “It requires a political resolution.”
That could be a long time coming, even as visitors continue to wonder at the resplendent feathered headdress, a marvel from an era shrouded in the mists of time.
Times special correspondents Liliana Nieto del Rio in Vienna and Cecilia Sanchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.
VIENNA (Reuters) -Austrian Chancellor Christian Stocker will undergo a “routine” operation next week after experiencing back pain, his office said on Wednesday, adding that he plans to work from home after he is discharged from hospital.
“Chancellor Christian Stocker has been suffering from back pain for some time. On medical advice, he will therefore undergo a planned routine operation during the autumn half-term holiday at the end of October,” his office said in a statement, referring to next week.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Baby boomers aren’t just flocking down to sunshine states like Florida to kickstart their retirement careers anymore—they’re booking a one-way ticket overseas for a better quality of life.
While the United States lacks a formal retirement visa, many other countries offer dedicated programs for retirees to have more affordable living and a new laid-back lifestyle, which is why it’s no surprise the U.S. didn’t make the cut in the Global Citizen Solutions’ 2025 retirement report.
For expats ready for cobblestone views and sipping coffee on a sunny terrace, the new report ranks 44 passive income and retirement visa programs. It also evaluated 20 key indicators grouped into six main categories: visa procedures, citizenship and mobility, economic factors, tax benefits, quality of life, and safety and social integration. Each country received a score out of 100.
Many of the top-ranked countries were in Europe and South America. Portugal ranked as the best, followed by Mauritius and Spain.
“The countries dominating our rankings understand that successful retirement migration isn’t just about letting people in, it’s about helping them thrive,” Patricia Casaburi, CEO of Global Citizen Solutions, tells Fortune.
Portugal, Mauritius, and Spain top the list, she said, because they truly support new residents with tools to build a life. “They offer language programs, streamlined healthcare registration, and clear pathways from temporary residence to citizenship,” Casaburi explained. “Countries that treat retirees as temporary visitors rather than future citizens consistently underperform.”
The 10 best countries to retire abroad in 2025
Portugal
Mauritius
Spain
Uruguay
Austria
Italy
Slovenia
Malta
Latvia
Chile
Portugal
Coming in at number one was Portugal, where dual citizenship is allowed. The European country offers citizens a D7 Visa, a type of residency visa designed for people who have a stable passive income—making it a popular option for retirees.
What matters most to new international citizens is feeling secure and being able to build a real life in their new country, and Portugal excels at letting boomers build a new life without losing their roots.
“[Portugal] has institutional frameworks suggesting it will remain stable for the next 20-30 years of your retirement. Before making the move, research the country’s healthcare system rankings, political stability indices, and infrastructure investments. Visit during different seasons and talk to expat communities who’ve been there for 5+ years,” Casaburi added.
A single applicant needs about €870 per month in stable passive income. The processing time takes around 12 months. After the initial residency permit is granted and you’ve lived there for at least 5 years, you can apply to be a permanent citizen. Portugal also taxes its citizens on the income they make inside and outside of the country.
Mauritius
Next at number two was the eastern African country, Mauritius. Retirees can obtain a residence permit by demonstrating a minimum monthly income of $1,500, with processing times typically around three months.
The permit allows the main applicant to include their spouse or legal partner, as well as dependent children, making it a family-friendly option. Retirees benefit from a territorial tax system, meaning foreign-sourced income is not taxed, and there are no wealth or inheritance taxes. After six years of residency, retirees become eligible to apply for citizenship, and dual citizenship is permitted.
Spain
Number three was Spain. The Spanish non-lucrative visa (NLV) is designed for non-EU citizens who wish to live in Spain without engaging in any work. To qualify, applicants should have a stable income of at least €2,400 per month.
Processing for a visa typically takes around three months. Once approved, residents are subject to Spain’s worldwide tax system and potential inheritance tax. The NLV provides a pathway to Spanish citizenship after 10 years of legal residence, or just 2 years for citizens of select Latin American and other historically connected countries. Dual citizenship is allowed, depending on the laws of the applicant’s country of origin.
Uruguay
Coming in at number four was the South American country Uruguay, where residents need an income requirement of $2,000 of stable passive income a month. Processing time takes about one month. The main applicant can include spouse or legal partner, minor children and dependent adult children, there are no imposed taxes on foreign-sourced income, and no wealth and inheritance tax. Dual citizenship is allowed and the path to citizenship takes about 5 years.
Austria
Ending the top five was Austria. The country offers an independent residence permit as a pathway for people who can prove they have an income to support themselves while abroad. Processing time takes about 4 months and the main applicant could include a spouse, legal partner and minor children. For tax benefits, they have a worldwide tax system—meaning the country taxes its citizens on all their income, regardless of where it was earned—and no inheritance tax. The path to citizenship is 10 years, with dual citizenship allowed.
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The Syrian national, whom prosecutors have identified only as Mohammad A. in line with German privacy rules, was convicted of preparing a serious act of violence and supporting a terrorist act of violence abroad. The Berlin court gave him a suspended 18-month sentence.
Austrian officials said he had planned to attack outside the stadium with knives or explosives. CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said last year that the suspects wanted to kill “tens of thousands” of Swift’s fans.
The defendant made a “comprehensive confession” at his trial, which was held behind closed doors because of his age, according to the court. The verdict can be appealed.
Judges found that the defendant, then aged 14, supported the ideology of the Islamic State group at the time and was in contact via social media with a young man in neighboring Austria who planned to attack a Swift concert in Vienna.
The court said they found that, among other things, the defendant sent his acquaintance a video with bomb-building instructions and organized contact with an IS member.
Fans of singer Taylor Swift gather in Vienna, Austria, on August 8, 2024, after concerts were cancelled at the last minute.
ROLAND SCHLAGER/APA/AFP via Getty Images
Austrian authorities on Aug. 7, 2024, arrested two suspects just before three Swift concerts in Vienna were canceled. Concert organizers in Austria said they had expected up to 65,000 fans inside the stadium at each concert and as many as 30,000 onlookers outside, where authorities said the suspects planned to strike.
Austrian authorities took a third suspect into custody a day later, and investigators said they found bomb-making materials at one of the suspects’ homes.
Global Politics, Technology and Social Media Combine to Erode Trust and Interest
MEDIA, Pa., May 9, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– Results from a new survey focusing on Austria and the United States show changing attitudes about how the citizens of each country perceive the other. The survey is the first since the 1980s to poll perspectives of the relationship held by citizens of both countries. Excerpts from the survey, sponsored by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and prepared by the University of Salzburg, were released today.
The Institute will present full survey results on May 16, 2025 at the annual Botstiber Lecture on Austrian-American Affairs at the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.
“As generational change, global political developments, and new media reshape how Americans and Austrians see one another, this survey is a snapshot of the present and a roadmap for strengthening our mutual relationship for the challenges that lie ahead,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a board member of the Botstiber Institute. Heinisch is Professor of Austrian Politics in Comparative Perspective and chair of the Department of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Salzburg, Austria.
Heinisch added: “The mutual relationship matters to Austrians and Americans; however, it is not self-sustaining. This report provides needed insight to help address issues and foster understanding and support for the relationship in ways that benefit both countries.”
Initial findings from the survey include:
Both Austrians and Americans agree that the U.S. role in the world has diminished.
Austrian skepticism of the U.S. is shaped both by concerns about global issues important to them, such as international security, climate change, and economic stability, and by perceived negative developments in U.S. society and politics.
Younger generations of Austrians who speak English and use social media are more sympathetic to the U.S., while Americans who use social media are more skeptical of Austria.
Overall, Austrians credit U.S. influence on Austrian society since World War II, yet today they prefer closer ties with the EU.
Austrians concerned about U.S. society and politics still see America as the land of opportunity and view Americans somewhat more favorably than the country itself.
Preliminary information about the survey is available now online at the Botstiber Institute Website. The complete survey report will be released online May 16, 2025, the date of the annual Botstiber Lecture on Austrian-American Affairs. Professor Heinisch, a member of the Institute’s Board of Advisors, will present a summary of the survey results at the event and will be available to brief media members and interested organizations.
The survey was conducted in February, March and April in Austria and the United States by Market Institute, a Linz-based research firm.
###
About the Botstiber Institute The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies was founded in 2008 to promote an understanding of the historic relationship between the United States and Austria, including the lands of the former Habsburg empire, by awarding grants and fellowships, organizing lectures and conferences, and publishing the Journal of Austrian-American History.
About the Botstiber Foundation The Botstiber Foundation was created in 1995 by Dietrich W. Botstiber. Botstiber was born in Austria and emigrated to the United States in 1938 after the Nazis took control of the country. Following an extensive and successful career as engineer, inventor and business leader, Botstiber established a trust which actively manages three programs that advance the Botstiber mission: The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control, and VillageHaus, a clean water project in Southeast Asia.
Source: Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies
Czech authorities erected metal barriers or protective walls from sandbags, while water was released from dams to make space in reservoirs. Residents have been warned to get ready for possible evacuations.
Some public events planned for the weekend have been cancelled at the request of authorities, including soccer matches in the top two leagues.
“We have to be ready for the worst case scenarios,” Prime Minister Petr Fiala said after a meeting of his government’s central crisis committee. “A tough weekend is ahead of us.”
Meteorologists say a low pressure system from northern Italy was predicted to dump much rainfall in most parts of the Czech Republic, or Czechia, including the capital and border regions with Austria and Germany in the south, and Poland in the north.
Central Europeans are especially wary because some experts have compared the weekend forecast to devastating floods in 1997 in the region, referred to by some as the flood of the century.
Over 100 people were killed in the floods 27 years ago, including 50 in the eastern Czech Republic where large sections of land was inundated.
The biggest rainfall was predicted in the eastern half of the country, particularly in the Jeseniky mountains. The second largest city of Brno, located in eastern Czech Republic, is among places that have not had flooding protection work completed, unlike Prague.
Czechs were asked not to go to parks and woods as high winds of up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour were forecast.
In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk traveled on Friday to the southwestern Polish city of Wrocław where floods are forecast. Authorities appealed to residents to stock up on food and to prepare for power outages by charging power banks.
Tusk, meeting with firefighters and other emergency officials, said the forecasts were “not excessively alarming.”
“There is no reason to panic, but there is a reason to be fully mobilized,” he stressed.
The German Weather Service warned of heavy precipitation across swaths of the country, including the Alps, where heavy snowfall and strong winds are expected at higher altitudes.
The Alpine nation of Austria is also getting ready for heavy rains, and a massive cold front that is expected to bring snow to higher elevations.
The weather change arrived following a hot start to September in the region. Scientists have recorded Earth’s hottest summer on record, breaking a record set just one year ago.
Warsaw, Poland — European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen on Thursday pledged billions of euros in aid for Central European countries that suffered enormous damage to infrastructure and housing during the massive flooding that has so far claimed 24 lives in the region. Von der Leyen paid a quick visit to a flood-damaged area in southeast Poland and met with heads of the governments of the affected countries — Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
She said funds will be made available quickly for infrastructure repair from the EU’s solidarity fund, as well as 10 billion euros ($11 billion) from what is called the cohesion fund — for the most urgent repairs. In a special approach, no co-financing will be required from these countries for the money to be released.
“Here we say it’s 100% European money, no co-financing,” von der Leyen told a news briefing. “These are extraordinary times, and extraordinary times need extraordinary measures.”
A man stands next to sandbags placed along the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary, Sept. 20, 2024.
Marton Monus/REUTERS
Meanwhile, a massive flood wave threatened new areas and heavy rains also caused flooding and forced the evacuation of some 1,000 people in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. In Central Europe, the receding waters revealed the scale of the destruction caused by exceptionally heavy rains that began a week ago.
Czech Interior Minister Vit Rakušan said one more person was reported killed on Thursday in the country’s hard-hit northeast, bringing the death toll there to five. There were also seven deaths each in Poland and Romania, and five in Austria — with the overall death toll now at 24.
Authorities deployed troops to help. In the northeast Czech Republic, soldiers joined firefighters and other emergency crews to help with the recovery efforts. Army helicopters distributed humanitarian aid while soldiers were building temporary bridges in place of those that were swept away.
Some 400 people remained evacuated from the homes in the regional capital of Ostrava. In the southwest, the level of the Luznice River reached an extreme high but the evacuation of 1,000 people in the town of Veseli nad Luznici was not necessary for the moment, officials said.
Firefighters walk across a flooded street, Sept. 15, 2024, in Jesenik, Czech Republic.
Getty
Cleanup efforts were underway in Austria, where flooding washed away roads and led to landslides and bridge damage. Firefighters and soldiers pumped water and mud out of houses and disposed of damaged furniture, broadcaster ORF quoted fire department spokesperson Klaus Stebal as saying.
The governor of Lower Austria province, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, said reconstruction was expected to take years, according to the Austria Press Agency.
The Vienna public transport company has had to pump almost 1 million liters (260,000 gallons) of water since last weekend. Ten towns and areas were still inaccessible on Thursday, APA reported.
In Hungary, flood waters continued to rise as authorities closed roads and rail stations. Ferries along the Danube River halted.
The parliament building is pictured in the background as the Danube River floods its banks in Budapest, Hungary, Sept. 18, 2024.
ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP/Getty
In the capital, Budapest, water spilled over the city’s lower quays and threatened to reach tram and metro lines. Some transport services were suspended. Remarkable images showed the water of the Danube creeping up perilously close to the ground floor of Hungary’s Parliament building, which sits directly on its bank.
Further upriver, in a region known as the Danube Bend, homes and restaurants near the riverbanks were inundated.
Nearly 6,000 professionals, including members of Hungary’s water authority and military, were mobilized, and prison inmates were involved in filling sandbags, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said at a news conference Thursday.
The Danube stood at over 25 feet, approaching the 29.2-foot record set during major flooding in 2013.
In southwestern Poland, the high waters reached the city of Wroclaw and an extended wave was expected to take many hours, even days to pass, exerting pressure on the embankments.
The water level on the Oder River just before Wroclaw was 21 feet, some 6.5 feet above alarm levels but still lower compared to the disastrous flooding in 1997.
A car damaged by the flooding of the Biała Ladecka river is seen in Ladek Zdroj, Poland, Sept. 19, 2024.
Kacper Pempel/REUTERS
In the two most-affected towns, Stronie Slaskie and Ladek-Zdroj, tap water and power were restored, said Gen. Michal Kamieniecki, who was put in charge of the recovery operations there after an emotional appeal to Prime Minister Donald Tusk for help the day before by a young woman identified only as Katarzyna.
As concerns mounted, Tusk invited von der Leyen to Wroclaw to see the situation first hand. Government leaders from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria were also there.
In Italy, rivers flooded in the provinces of Ravenna, Bologna and Forlì-Cesena, as local mayors asked people to stay on the upper floors or leave their houses. Those areas were hit by devastating floods in 2023, when more than 20 rivers overflowed, killing 17 people.
Italy’s vice minister for transport and infrastructure, Galeazzo Bignami, said Thursday that two people were reported missing in Bagnocavallo, in Ravenna province.
At least 800 residents in Ravenna and almost 200 in Bologna province spent the night in shelters, schools and sports centers. Trains were suspended and schools closed while residents were advised to avoid travel.
The suspects in the foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concerts in Vienna earlier this month wanted to kill “tens of thousands” of the artist’s fans, CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said Wednesday at a security conference in Maryland.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including, I am sure, many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said, according to The Associated Press. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”
Swift’s Vienna concerts, which would have begun on Aug. 8, were canceled by the events’ organizers, Barracuda Music, when they were informed of the foiled plot by Austrian authorities.
Fans of singer Taylor Swift gather in Vienna, Austria, on August 8, 2024, after concerts were canceled at the last minute.
ROLAND SCHLAGER/APA/AFP/Getty
The move left tens of thousands of Swift’s fans, many of whom had traveled to Vienna from elsewhere in the country or abroad specifically to see a show, devastated.
“I won’t be able to see Taylor again with these resale prices so I am pretty devastated,” one social media user named Caroline said shortly after the shows were canceled. “This was supposed to be my ‘you beat cancer’ trip so losing it hurts.”
Another social media user named Sarah wrote that she had been “waiting to see taylor in my home country since i was 9 years old, i’m now 25… to have all this taken away by some men being so fueled by hatred for no reason at all makes me so beyond angry i can’t put it into words.”
The main suspect in the alleged plot, along with a 17-year-old, were taken into custody on Aug. 6, the day before the cancelations were announced. Austrian officials said the primary suspect, who they have not named due to Austrian privacy laws, was inspired by ISIS. They said he had planned to attack outside the stadium with knives or explosives.
A third suspect, who was 18 years old, was arrested on Aug. 8.
At the security conference Wednesday, CIA Deputy Director Cohen praised the CIA’s work, saying counterterrorism “successes” often go unheralded, according to the AP.
“I can tell you within my agency, and I’m sure in others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” he said, referring to the location of the CIA headquarters in Virginia. “And not just the Swifties in my workforce.”
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour shows in Vienna, Austria, have been canceled after government officials confirmed an alleged ISIS-linked terrorist plot to attack large events, organizers said Wednesday.
“With confirmation from government officials of a planned terrorist attack at Ernst Happel Stadium, we have no choice but to cancel the three scheduled shows for everyone’s safety,” Barracuda Music, the concerts’ organizer, said in an online post.
The announcement came shortly after two suspected extremists were arrested in Austria on Wednesday, one of whom appeared to be planning an attack on a major event in the Vienna area such as Swift’s concerts over the weekend, authorities said.
Austrian authorities said that the two individuals are tied to ISIS. The information about the suspects originated from U.S. intelligence and was communicated to Austrian authorities, sources familiar with the matter told CBS News.
The Ernst Happel Stadion, where Taylor Swift will perform three concerts this week, pictured on June 4, 2024, in Vienna, Austria
Guenther Iby/SEPA.Media /Getty Images
The 19-year-old main suspect was arrested in Ternitz, south of Vienna, and the second person in the Austrian capital.
Swift’s concerts had been scheduled to take place at Vienna’s Ernst Happel Stadium on Thursday, Friday and Saturday as part of her massively successful Eras Tour. The shows’ ticket vendor in Austria said that all tickets would be refunded within 10 business days.
Franz Ruf, the public security director at Austria’s interior ministry, said that authorities became aware of “preparatory actions” for a possible attack “and also that there is a focus by the 19-year-old perpetrator on the Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna,” the Austria Press Agency reported. Ruf said the concerts would have attracted audiences of up to 65,000, with thousands more expected to congregate outside the stadium.
A “targeted raid was carried out this morning,” coordinated by various state and city law enforcement offices, Ruf said.
Taylor Swift performs onstage during The Eras Tour on July 27, 2024, in Munich, Germany.
Thomas Niedermueller/TAS24/Getty Images
The Austrian Interior Ministry said that both suspects had become radicalized on the internet and made “concrete preparations for a terrorist attack.” Ruf said the 19-year-old Austrian citizen had pledged an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State group in July.
Ruf also said that chemical substances were seized from the main suspect’s home and were being evaluated. He didn’t give more details.
A person familiar with the matter told CBS News Wednesday evening that police found chemical substances when the 19-year-old was arrested, but not all the components necessary to build a working explosive device.
Austrian authorities canceled the concerts out of an abundance of caution because the investigation is continuing into other possible co-conspirators who may have been involved in the alleged plans, the source added.
Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer called the concerts’ cancellation “a bitter disappointment for all fans in Austria,” adding that “the threat was recognized early, combated and a tragedy prevented.”
“We live in a time in which violent means are being used to attack our western way of life,” Nehammer wrote on social media. “Islamist terrorism threatens security and freedom in many western countries. This is precisely why we will not give up our values such as freedom and democracy, but will defend them even more vehemently.”
Prior to the cancellation announcement, Provincial Police President Gerhard Pürstl had said officials would step up security measures for the concerts to include the deployment of police officers in both civilian clothes and uniform, video surveillance, a police dog unit and other special law enforcement units.
There is a reason, at the very moment Gareth Southgate and his players were having obscenities and plastic cups hurled at them in Cologne on Tuesday, every leading UK bookmaker was slashing the odds on England winning Euro 2024.
It had nothing to do with a sudden surge of optimism or a flurry of betting activity. After all, who would lump any money on an England triumph after that?
It was because of the way the tournament has begun to take shape: the odds for England were cut along with Italy, Austria and Switzerland. The odds on French, Spanish, German or Portuguese glory drifted accordingly.
If it was a free draw after the group stage, as what happens in European club competition, it would be hard to look beyond Spain, Germany, Portugal and — as poorly as they have played so far — pre-tournament favourites France.
But the path was pre-determined. The knockout bracket looked unbalanced before a ball was kicked. It has been unbalanced further by France’s failure to win their group, meaning they join Spain, Germany, Portugal and Denmark in the top half of the bracket. Belgium, should they finish second or third in Group E, could end up there too.
GO DEEPER
What is England’s route to Euro 2024 final?
On paper, the bottom quarter of the bracket looks reasonably strong: Switzerland facing Italy in Berlin on Saturday; England facing a third-placed team (quite feasibly the Netherlands) on Sunday. But Switzerland, Italy and England won one game each in the group stage. Add the Netherlands (or whoever finishes third in Group E — Romania, Belgium, Slovakia or Ukraine) and it becomes four wins from a possible 12.
To spell this out, in the bottom quarter of the draw, a team that has won just once in the group stage will reach the semi-final — where the worst-case scenario would mean facing Austria, Belgium or the Netherlands. The most likely semi-final permutations in the other half of the draw might be Spain or Germany vs Portugal or France.
It was put to Southgate on Tuesday, after a dire 0-0 draw with Slovenia, that England might have got lucky with how the knockout stage is shaping up. “We shouldn’t be seduced by which half of the draw,” the manager told ITV Sport. “We have to take a step at a time. Tonight was an improvement. We’ve got to improve to win the next round.”
In his post-match news conference, it was spelt out to him that England had ended up on the opposite side of the bracket to Germany, France, Spain and Portugal. “We have huge respect for all of the teams you’ve mentioned but equally, there are some very good teams on our side of the draw,” he said.
Not equally, though. As at the 2018 World Cup, fortune has smiled on England and on all the other teams who have ended up on that side of the bracket — not least Austria, who are entitled to claim that, by finishing ahead of France and the Netherlands, they have made their own luck.
In 2018, five of the six top-ranked teams in the knockout stage (Brazil, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina and France) ended up on one side of the draw, while the other half consisted of Spain (who had won only one of their three group games), Russia, Croatia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Colombia and England.
That World Cup was widely regarded as Belgium’s best chance of winning a major tournament, with so many of their ‘golden generation’ of players at or around the peak of their powers. But they paid a heavy price for winning Group G, beating Japan and Brazil but then falling to France in the semi-final. England’s prize for finishing second to Belgium in their group was a place in the gentler side of the draw, which led to them beating Colombia and Sweden before defeat by Croatia in the semi-final.
Euro 2016 brought a similar imbalance. Italy, under Antonio Conte, excelled in the group stage, but their prize for winning Group E was to be placed on the tougher side of the draw. They beat Spain 2-0 but lost to Germany on penalties in the quarter-final. Germany in turn lost to hosts France in the semi-final. On the other side, Portugal — who had scraped third place in Group F by drawing with Iceland, Austria and Hungary — reached the final by beating Croatia in the round of 16, Poland in the quarter-final and Wales in the semi-final.
Some competitions are based on a free draw, such as the FA Cup. Others, such as the NFL or NBA, see teams ranked on their regular-season record, which should theoretically ensure the two strongest teams in either conference end up on opposite sides of the draw.
International football competitions — including the World Cup, European Championship, Copa America, Africa Cup of Nations and Asian Cup — do not work like that. It is pre-determined from the moment the draw is made: the winner of Group A will play the runner-up of Group B, the winner of Group C will play the runner-up of Group D and so on.
The group-stage draw is seeded, but teams are allocated to each group by a random draw, which raises the possibility of the knockout bracket ending up lop-sided. Because the tournaments are condensed into a four-week or five-week period, with matches played in a host nation, it is felt beneficial to have a pre-determined structure for planning, travel and ensuring each team has enough rest between matches.
There are still inconsistencies. Austria will have a seven-day break between the end of their group matches on Tuesday and their first knockout round next Tuesday, whereas Spain’s opponents in the round of 16 (still to be determined) will have had just four days’ rest.
Everything about knockout football lends itself to variance. But it can be predicted with some confidence that a team that has performed miserably at Euro 2024 will reach the semi-final or feasibly the final. After a difficult group stage, England, Switzerland, Italy and others have had a soft landing. For one of them, it might even prove a springboard.
(Top photo: Andreas Gora/Picture Alliance via Getty Images))
Marlene Engelhorn, an Austrian heiress who inherited tens of millions of euros from her grandmother, opted to let strangers decide where to give away €25 million ($27 million)—at least 90% of her fortune—over the past six weeks. Engelhorn has long criticized the Austrian policy of not placing any taxes for inheritances, since she feels being born into a wealthy family is a matter of luck and she did not earn the money.
“A large part of my inherited wealth, which elevated me to a position of power simply by virtue of my birth, contradicting every democratic principle, has now been redistributed in accordance with democratic values,” she said in a statement, per BBC News.
In an attempt to give away her fortune in as democratic of a way as possible, Engelhorn sent out emails to approximately 10,000 randomly selected Austrians, and chose 50 people who were designed to be as representative as possible of Austria’s demographics in terms of gender, ethnicity, and income.
The group was developed into an organization called the Good Council for Redistribution, and chose 77 different organizations, revealed on Tuesday, to which Engelhorn’s wealth would be distributed. Once the group was formed, the heiress withdrew from the process, saying in a public mission statement that “redistribution must be a process that extends beyond [herself].”
The largest distribution of cash went to the Austrian society for nature conservation, which received the equivalent of $1.7 million. The second largest distribution of $1.6 million went to an organization called Neunerhaus, which offers aid to homeless people. Other organizations that received money included climate charities, the left-wing think tank Momentum Institute, and religious organizations.
INCEST beast Josef Fritzl has been seen out of prison visiting local cafes just weeks before his release, it has been claimed.
Fritzl, 88, was spotted at several public places near his prison in Krems an der Donau, where he has been serving his sentence for 15 years.
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Josef Fritzl has been reportedly seen out of prison just weeks before his potential release
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He was seen visiting several cafes near Sankt Poelten Prison (pictured) where the monster is currently jailedCredit: Newsflash
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Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison after he raped his daughter Elizabeth and fathered seven children with her
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Josef Fritzl at Sankt Poelten PrisonCredit: Newsflash
Local media claimed that Fritzl “has been seen in different cafes of Krems”.
One of them confirmed multiple sightings of depraved Frtizl.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one editor said: “It is true. I’ve been told by several people I fully trust that they have seen him.
“It’s not as if just one resident has been convinced they saw Fritzl.
“I’ve got this information from several trusted acquaintances independently from each other.”
Judiciary officials, however, have refused to comment on the report.
The sightings come as a bid to free Fritzl, now 88, from the secure psychiatric wing of Stein Prison comes to a head.
He was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 after locking his daughter, Elisabeth, in the basement of his home in Amstetten, Austria, for 24 years and fathering seven children with her.
One of the children, who died at birth due to breathing difficulties, was heartlessly tossed in a furnace by Fritzl.
Three were brought up in the basement with their mum and three others were brought up as foundlings by sick Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie.
Fritzl repeatedly raped and abused his daughter while she was held captive.
During his trial, Fritzl pleaded guilty to rape, false imprisonment, manslaughter by negligence and incest.
Elisabeth Fritzl has since changed her name and has received support from the authorities in protecting her identity and the well-being of her children.
Rosemarie, now 84, divorced the monster after his horrific crimes were laid bare.
Now, after 15 years behind bars, the incest monster is eligible for parole this year.
Under local laws, inmates deemed ready for parole can be freed depending on their conduct and mental and physical condition.
The sick monster will become eligible for parole in March of this year under Austria’s lenient sentencing laws.
Fritzl, who has asked to be released, is set to have his case reviewed by justice and prison officials.
Adelheid Kastner, one of Austria’s most renowned psychiatrists, said Fritzl was no longer a threat to society.
The sick monster, who has Alzheimer’s disease, would be incapable of carrying out any crimes, the doctor added.
Psychiatrists and medics continue to monitor his condition.
Fritzl’s lawyer Astrid Wagner revealed that Fritzl could be relocated to a regular public care home.
Wagner, who visits Fritzl regularly, previously told The Sun: “I personally see a chance for a release.
“He fulfils all the criteria. It is of course within the bounds of possibility that his new accommodation could be a public institution for elderly people.
“This man is almost 90 and his mental condition is deteriorating. He is in need of support and care.”
She added: “It is possible to normally communicate with him most of the time.
“However, there are these odd lapses. One day he told me how happy he was about his daughter’s marriage to Boris Becker.
“The next time I saw him he told me they had broken up.”
“Never again for anyone.” Dozens of protesters disrupted the Austrian Parliament calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. The ‘Not in Our Name Vienna’ group is at odds with Austria’s support for Israel and wants to see an end to the slaughter and occupation of Palestine.
A CORPSE IN THE DANUBE AND A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE might sound more like elements from a film noir than an explanation of what’s happening in Europe today. But to understand the tortured state of the Continent’s politics, there’s no better place to start.
In October, the body of Christian Pilnacek, once the most powerful man in the Austrian justice ministry, was found floating in the river not far from the town of Krems, dead of an apparent suicide a few hours after he’d been arrested on a DUI after driving in the wrong direction on the highway.
“His life was taken from him,” the civil servant’s widow, a top prosecutor, told a memorial service in November, in a bitter swipe at the country’s political elites.
Pilnacek, a dapper civil servant who counted as one of his country’s best legal minds, had spent the preceding years battling a series of allegations that he had leaked privileged information to his political cronies and the press and had tried to quash a sweeping corruption investigation surrounding Vienna’s purchase of fighter jets.
In the wake of his death, however, it seemed that it wasn’t a guilty conscience that pushed him over the brink, but a refusal to bend his principles to the will of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), a bulwark of the country’s political system that has been part of the federal government without interruption since 1987.
A month after his body was found, a surreptitious recording of Pilnacek emerged, in which he could be heard describing how senior politicians in the ÖVP, the party of former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, had pressured him to kill investigations into political corruption.
“ÖVP ministers came to me even after there had been a search of the party headquarters and asked why I won’t shut it down,” Pilnacek, a gregarious man who enjoyed a good gossip, can be heard saying on the recording. “I always told them: I can’t do it, I won’t do it, I don’t want to do it.”
Facing his own legal troubles and feeling unjustly accused, he had turned to those same politicians for help — only to have been refused because the distraught civil servant hadn’t been effective in halting the other investigations.
“When I asked if they would do something to support me, the response was: ‘You were never really with us,’” Pilnacek says on the tape, which was recorded without his knowledge at a Vienna restaurant a few months before his death.
Even for a society steeled by decades of political scandal and corruption, the episode was jaw-dropping, prompting loud calls for a reckoning.
It’ll have to wait. For many Austrian voters, the biggest shocker surrounding the affair was the ÖVP’s reaction to the revelations. Instead of dissolving the government and triggering a new election, leaders of the center-right party went on the attack, accusing their political enemies of intrigue and using “KGB methods” to undermine the party.
“It’s not acceptable for our country to turn into a state of snitches,” ÖVP General Secretary Christian Stocker warned.
Christian Pilnacek during the trial of Johann Fuchs, the head of the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office in 2022. Fuchs was alleged to have breached official secrecy and given false testimony before the Ibiza-U Committee | Johann Groder/EXPA via Belga
It was, in effect, a concession to his opponents, especially on the far right. In attempting to lead Austrians down a conspiracy rabbit hole instead of coming clean, Stocker was resorting to the very populist tactics his party had for years insisted were beneath it.
Far right rising
AS EUROPE FACES ITS MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION YEAR in living memory, the Continent is in for another round of soul-searching about the reasons behind the rise of the far right and other anti-establishment forces.
There are, of course, a variety of factors. Depending on the party and the country, they range from a sharp rise in migration to resentment over how establishment parties managed the pandemic to the European Union’s support for Ukraine and concerns over the war in Gaza.
But there’s another potent driver that’s far less often discussed: a wave of corruption scandals that has washed over Europe’s political establishment in recent years, providing ample grist for far-right parties that cast “the system” as hopelessly crooked and engineered to harm “normal” people.
While most far-right parties have their own issues with corruption and graft, voters tend to be more forgiving of their crimes, often because they consider the entire political class to be untrustworthy and are attracted to the parties’ often radical (if unrealistic) prescriptions for solving political problems.
Austria — home to the Freedom Party (FPÖ), a group founded in the 1950s by a former SS general — is poised to see the most dramatic rightward shift. The Pilnacek affair marks just the latest in a string of scandals that have exposed systemic corruption in the governing ÖVP, buoying the FPÖ, which has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls for more than a year.
With the European Parliament election in June and a national poll expected in the fall, the far-right party’s rise could have a substantial impact on the Continent’s politics. Austria, by virtue of its history and position at the crossroads of Europe, has often served as a proving ground for political movements. It was here, for example, that both the political antisemitism that inspired Adolf Hitler and Theodor Herzl’s Zionist movement were born.
More recently, it has served as a laboratory for the anti-immigrant far right, which under the FPÖ is poised to record one of its greatest victories yet.
Party leader Herbert Kickl — a hard-right ideologue who has vowed to halt both Ukraine’s EU accession and the sanctions the bloc has imposed on Russia — may soon be sitting in the Council alongside the EU’s bête noire, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whom Kickl has described as a role model.
At a packed rally near the southern Austrian city of Graz last weekend, Kickl called for an “EU of the fatherlands,” pledging to “defend Austria’s interests” alongside allies like the Hungarian leader.
“The technical term at the European level is ‘veto,’” Kickl told the enthusiastic crowd, which sat at long beer hall tables sipping mugs of lager. Kickl took the stage amid a flurry of fireworks as the theme music from the film “Hercules” played in the background. Throughout his hourlong address, audience members, many wearing lederhosen and other traditional Alpine garb, interrupted his remarks with loud chants of “Herbert, Herbert!”
“They can’t stop us,” Kickl said at one point during the show, dismissing Karl Nehammer, the current ÖVP chancellor, as a “dead man walking.”
Chairman of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPOe) Herbert Kickl | Alex Halada/AFP via Getty Images
Nehammer’s ÖVP is currently polling in third place behind the FPÖ and the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and his personal ratings are the lowest ever recorded for a chancellor, with more than 60 percent of respondents in a recent poll saying they had no confidence in him.
To be fair, he’s the second man to inherit the job after Kurz’s 2021 resignation and had only limited political experience. Recent campaigns by his image makers to boost his standing, such as one on the virtues of eating schnitzel, have fallen flat. His reputation was further undermined in September following the release of a video of a small party gathering in Salzburg, where he suggested poor people go to McDonald’s if they want a hot meal for their children.
Kickl’s momentum has created a bigger worry for Europe: A big win by the FPÖ could fuel support for its German sister party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is already in second place, polling at more than 20 percent.
Corruptus delicti
CORRUPTION AND POLITICS HAVE ALWAYS EXISTED hand-in-glove, but the topic has gained new-found relevance as scandals have rocked many of Europe’s once-dominant centrist parties from France to Italy to Greece, pushing some to the brink of extinction.
After years of corruption investigations and prosecutions involving former President Nicolas Sarkozy and other leading figures, for example, France’s once-dominant center right finished with less than 5 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2022.
In Spain, the center-right Popular Party (PP) is still suffering from a sweeping corruption case that led to the conviction of 29 people, including senior party officials, in 2018.
The problem is even worse in Central Europe, where a culture of corruption amongst the political mainstream in countries such as the Czech Republic has fueled the rise of populists such as Andrej Babiš, who won power on a promise to clean up the system in 2017 only to face an investigation into fraud allegations himself.
And in Brussels, the Qatargate cash-for-influence case has rocked the European Parliament with the biggest corruption scandal to hit the European institutions for decades.
In contrast to far-right parties, which often bounce back from scandal under new leadership on the power of their radical rhetoric, mainstream parties have a more difficult time — in large part because it’s often not clear what they stand for. After World War II, Europe’s center-right and center-left blocs served distinct clienteles: the professional and working classes, usually with strong ties to other interest groups such as farmers and churches.
These days, however, the differences between the blocs are often difficult to discern. With voter preference often influenced more by personality than substance, allegiance to the parties has frayed.
When it comes to corruption, Austria — a country of nearly 9 million people situated in the center of the Continent — stands apart: Its scandals are literally the stuff of Netflix series.
The country’s center-right and center-left parties (ÖVP and SPÖ) have dominated the country’s politics since WWII. That success created a system of clientelism and patronage, however, that is in the process of disintegrating following a series of investigations and court trials.
Investigators explored allegations that Eurofighter lobbyists paid about €100 million to Austrian politicians in exchange for the country’s €2 billion order of fighter jets in 2003 | Johannes Simon/Getty Images
In the 1970s, the Lucona affair involved a scheme hatched by a politically connected coffee-house owner named Udo Proksch. His plan involved blowing up a tanker he’d purchased to collect the insurance. Six people were killed in the explosion near the Maldives in 1977 sinking the tanker. Subsequent investigations into Proksch’s political links led to the resignation of 16 officials, including the president of the Austrian parliament, which under the constitution counts as the second-highest office, and the interior minister. The episode was later made into a movie.
The so-called Noricum Affair in the 1980s involved the illegal sale of hundreds of howitzers by an Austrian arms maker to both Iran and Iraq, which were engaged in a war against one another at the time. It, too, exposed close links between the politicians and illicit business interests. Cleaning up was more straightforward because the same politicians at the center of the affair had already been implicated in the Lucona scandal.
More recently, investigators explored allegations that Eurofighter lobbyists paid about €100 million to Austrian politicians in exchange for the country’s €2 billion order of fighter jets in 2003. In 2019, Pilnacek told colleagues in a meeting that he would “turn a blind eye” if they quietly shut down the investigation, arguing that it wasn’t winnable. That sparked a probe against him for alleged abuse of his office, which was later shelved.
After a more than decade-long investigation, prosecutors filed charges in June against two executives involved in the Eurofighter deal, alleging money laundering. The chances for convictions are murky, however. Despite ample evidence that the lobbyists paid out bribes, the only convictions in the case so far have been across the border in Germany.
Turnaround
IT’S IRONIC, GIVEN KICKL’S FOCUS ON STATE CORRUPTION, that the Austrian scandal to beat all scandals (which inspired both a miniseries and a separate documentary) involved not one of the centrist establishment parties but the FPÖ itself.
Named after the Spanish island of Ibiza, it was the result of a 2017 sting by a private investigator and his female companion, who was posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch.
Together, they lured Heinz-Christian Strache, then the FPÖ leader, and an associate of his to a villa on the island. They had outfitted the house with hidden cameras. Over the course of a long evening fueled by an endless supply of cigarettes and vodka mixed with Red Bull, Strache — who at the time was not in government — offered to trade influence for financial support.
By the time the video of the encounter was leaked in mid-2019, Strache was vice chancellor in a government led by the ÖVP’s Kurz.
The affair triggered an unprecedented political crisis, prompting a government collapse and new elections that left the FPÖ weakened and in opposition.
In retrospect, it was a lucky turn of events for the party. While Kurz’s ÖVP did well in the election as the FPÖ sank, the flurry of investigations surrounding Ibiza ended up ensnaring the center right as well.
A cache of revealing text messages discovered on a Kurz aide’s phone exposed the chancellor’s sonny-boy persona to be fiction; instead of the modernizer the chancellor claimed to be, Kurz was revealed as an old-school machine politician willing to do whatever it took to ensure his hold on power.
Facing criminal investigations for allegedly making false statements to parliament and using state funds to pay for manipulated polls, Kurz was forced to resign in October 2021 and is currently standing trial.
Austria’s former chancellor Sebastian Kurz was embroiled in a flurry of investigations surrounding the Ibiza scandal | Alex Halada/AFP via Getty Images
Kickl, meanwhile, took over the FPÖ and has used its time in opposition to reposition the party both as a scourge of the corruption it once embodied and as a paragon of far-right ideology: anti-immigrant, anti-establishment, anti-EU and anti-support for Ukraine in its war against Russia.
The turnaround of his party indicates that voters may be willing to look past previous corruption if a party has a compelling message and a leader who embodies it. Though Kickl’s approval ratings aren’t high, people take him seriously. In contrast to Strache, a trained dental technician who cultivated a playboy image, Kickl is an austere presence with a passion for triathlons and other extreme sports who eats unsweetened oatmeal with sour milk for breakfast.
After studying philosophy and political science (and completing degrees in neither), Kickl became active in the Freedom Party in the 1990s as an aide to Jörg Haider, the party’s then-leader who pioneered many of the far-right strategies, including the focus on migration, that have made the parties a force to be reckoned with across Europe. A charismatic icon to many in Austria, Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008, led the Freedom Party into government in 2000 as the junior partner to the ÖVP, sparking outrage across Europe and a diplomatic boycott by Austria’s EU partners.
For most of his political career, Kickl worked behind the scenes as an adviser and speechwriter. He is credited with coining many of the party’s most memorable — and controversial — slogans, such as “Pummerin, not muezin.” Pummerin is the nickname of the massive bell atop St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. It was originally cast from Turkish cannons captured during an Ottoman siege of the city in the 17th century. Some of Kickl’s other lines have been not just offensive, but outright racist. In a 2001 speech he wrote for Haider, he penned the line: “I don’t know how someone named Ariel can be so dirty,” an antisemitic reference to Ariel Muzikant, the then leader of Austria’s Jewish community. “Ariel” is also a brand of detergent.
Despite widespread condemnation of Kickl’s rhetoric (during a short stint as interior minister in 2018, he called for “concentrating asylum seekers in one place” and changed the name of an asylum registration facility to “deportation center“) his standing within the party only improved. In an effort to appeal to a wider audience, he has also softened some of his racist overtones — a bit. He recently began campaigning under the banner “Volkskanzler,” or people’s chancellor. While it may sound innocuous, it was also a moniker used by Hitler.
“He’s on the road to success,” said Anton Pelinka, the doyen of Austrian political science. “The content of what he says is as extreme as ever but the way in which he presents it is more moderate.”
That gentler approach has helped the FPÖ nearly double its support since the last election in 2019. The party has also scored strong gains in a string of regional elections, joining state government alongside the ÖVP as the junior partner, a process that has helped further normalize its extreme political agenda.
In contrast, the ÖVP is on the defensive. The party’s support has fallen to about 20 percent, from a post-Ibiza high of more than 37 percent and its loss of regional support has forced it into coalition with the FPÖ.
Pilnacek affair
THE DRAMA SURROUNDING KURZ HASN’T HELPED. Now a business consultant, the ex-chancellor recently suffered another blow after his association with René Benko, a high-flying Austrian real estate tycoon, was exposed.
Benko, whose empire was forced into bankruptcy in recent weeks in the largest insolvency in Austrian history, employed Kurz to lure investors from the Middle East, agreeing to pay the former politician millions in return.
And there’s Kurz’s role in the Pilnacek affair. On the morning the body of the former official was discovered, Kurz interrupted his testimony in court to express his shock, saying he had spoken to him the night before about his case. “I saw how he was treated in recent years, and I saw what it did to him,” he told journalists later that day.
Kurz wasn’t referring to his own party’s treatment of Pilnacek, however, but the corruption prosecutor’s pursuit of him. Unwittingly, the chancellor triggered the release of the damning audio of Pilnacek in the restaurant.
The recording was made by Christian Mattura, a former politician, who was having dinner with Pilnacek and decided to secretly tape the conversation when the subject turned to the ÖVP. He claimed later he had no intention of releasing the audio until he heard Kurz’s comments, which he viewed as hypocrisy and as a crass attempt to use Pilnacek’s tragic end to attack prosecutors.
Kurz declined to comment for this article.
Austrian National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka | Alex Halada/APA/AFP via Getty Images
More damaging to the ÖVP, however, is the role of its parliamentary president, Wolfgang Sobotka. In the recording, Pilnacek fingered Sobotka, a former interior minister and longtime ÖVP powerbroker, for pressuring him to end a number of investigations into the party.
“In every conversation, Sobotka would say, ‘you failed, you didn’t shut down’” the investigations, Pilnacek said on the secret recording. “But it wasn’t possible, and I wouldn’t do it. We live in a country of laws.”
Sobotka denied the allegations, saying that he never discussed ongoing investigations with Pilnacek, a fact he said the official had himself confirmed in testimony to parliament. Sobotka said he would continue to carry out his office “in accordance with the law.”
Kickl has wasted few opportunities to capitalize on the scandal, calling for Sobotka’s immediate resignation, telling him directly in parliament: “You are not our president.”
“I’m tempted to say that in comparison to you, Strache was a man of honor,” Kickl said during a debate, referring to his predecessor’s quick resignation after the Ibiza video became public. “At least he knew what to do when he was confronted with the accusations.”
Sobotka appears intent on waiting for things to blow over, a tactic that has worked before. In 2020, it emerged that Novomatic, an Austrian casino group at the center of the Ibiza investigations, had donated €8,000 to a chamber orchestra in Sobotka’s hometown, Waidhofen an der Ybbs. The orchestra’s director? Wolfgang Sobotka. He disputes any connection to the donation.
The politician’s affinity for classical music also inspired him to rent a gold-plated Bösendorfer grand piano for the parliament to the tune of €3,000 a month. His office defended the move, arguing that “art and culture are a top priority in Austria.” The public wasn’t buying it though, and Sobotka eventually bowed to pressure to exchange the piano for a standard black model.
Fixing the reputational damage has been more challenging. About 80 percent of voters have no confidence in him, according to a recent poll, ranking Sobotka last among all Austrian politicians. Sobotka did not respond to comment for this article.
So far, Sobotka has refused to resign, handing a gift that keeps on giving to Kickl, for whom Sobotka serves as Exhibit A in his recitation of all that’s wrong with the other political parties. Kickl understands that — given his lead in the polls — he only needs to wait. “The madness will end soon,” he promised his party faithful in Graz. “Salvation is at hand.”
GASTON Glock rose to prominence in the early 1980s after he developed the Glock pistol in 1982.
At the time, he was married to Helga Glock, but following their 2011 divorce, he tied the knot with Kathrin Glock, whom he was with up until his December 2023 passing.
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Kathrin Glock married Gaston in 2011Credit: Getty
Who is Gaston Glock’s wife, Kathrin?
For more than a decade, Gaston Glock was married to Austrian entrepreneur Kathrin Glock.
The pair tied the knot in 2011, despite a more than 50-year age gap.
Not much is known about the pair’s relationship, but they reportedly met in 2004, according to The Guardian.
Outside of being known as Glock’s wife, Kathrin is known for her career as a CEO.
She is in charge of several GLOCK departments, including GLOCK Health, Science and Research, GLOCK Ecotech, GLOCK Aviation, and GLOCK Security, according to her LinkedIn profile.
In addition to serving as CEO, she is also a supporter of animal welfare.
At this time, additional information on Kathrin’s personal life is unclear because she often stays out of the spotlight.
What was Gaston Glock’s cause of death?
Glock’s death was first announced on December 27, 2023, by his company.
“With visionary foresight, Gaston Glock built his company and led it to the top of the world with the internationally valued Glock Perfection,” his company said in a statement, via Eurodressage.
“Until the very end, he was responsible for the strategic direction of the Glock group of companies and its employees.”
He died at the age of 94, but no cause was provided.
Kathrin has not commented on his death, but she did post a tribute on Instagram to more than 52,000 followers.
The black and white picture, which is the only one on her page as of this writing, was captioned “endless love,” followed by a heart emoji.
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Gaston Glock died on December 27, 2023, at the age of 94Credit: Getty
Did Gaston Glock have children?
Before Glock passed away, he welcomed three children, two sons and a daughter.
He welcomed his sons during his first marriage to Helga and his daughter during his second marriage to Kathrin.
At this time, information on the Glock children is unclear because they often stay out of the spotlight and off social media.
BRUSSELS — Western leaders are grappling with how to handle two era-defining wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine. But there’s another issue, one far closer to home, that’s derailing governments in Europe and America: migration.
In recent days, U.S. President Joe Biden, his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all hit trouble amid intense domestic pressure to tackle immigration; all three emerged weakened as a result. The stakes are high as American, British and European voters head to the polls in 2024.
“There is a temptation to hunt for quick fixes,” said Rashmin Sagoo, director of the international law program at the Chatham House think tank in London. “But irregular migration is a hugely challenging issue. And solving it requires long-term policy thinking beyond national boundaries.”
With election campaigning already under way, long-term plans may be hard to find. Far-right, anti-migrant populists promising sharp answers are gaining support in many Western democracies, leaving mainstream parties to count the costs. Less than a month ago in the Netherlands, pragmatic Dutch centrists lost to an anti-migrant radical.
Who will be next?
Rishi Sunak, United Kingdom
In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under pressure from members of his own ruling Conservative party who fear voters will punish them over the government’s failure to get a grip on migration.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a press conference in Dover on June 5, 2023 in Dover, England | Pool photo by Yui Mok/WPA via Getty Images
Seven years ago, voters backed Brexit because euroskeptic campaigners promised to “Take Back Control” of the U.K.’s borders. Instead, the picture is now more chaotic than ever. The U.K. chalked up record net migration figures last month, and the government has failed so far to stop small boats packed with asylum seekers crossing the English Channel.
Sunak is now in the firing line. He made a pledge to “Stop the Boats” central to his premiership. In the process, he ignited a war in his already divided party about just how far Britain should go.
Under Sunak’s deal with Rwanda, the central African nation agreed to resettle asylum seekers who arrived on British shores in small boats. The PM says the policy will deter migrants from making sea crossings to the U.K. in the first place. But the plan was struck down by the Supreme Court in London, and Sunak’s Tories now can’t agree on what to do next.
Having survived what threatened to be a catastrophic rebellion in parliament on Tuesday, the British premier still faces a brutal battle in the legislature over his proposed Rwanda law early next year.
Time is running out for Sunak to find a fix. An election is expected next fall.
Emmanuel Macron, France
The French president suffered an unexpected body blow when the lower house of parliament rejected his flagship immigration bill this week.
French President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysee Palace in Paris, on June 21, 2023 | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
After losing parliamentary elections last year, getting legislation through the National Assembly has been a fraught process for Macron. He has been forced to rely on votes from the right-wing Les Républicains party on more than one occasion.
Macron’s draft law on immigration was meant to please both the conservatives and the center-left with a carefully designed mix of repressive and liberal measures. But in a dramatic upset, the National Assembly, which is split between centrists, the left and the far right, voted against the legislation on day one of debates.
Now Macron is searching for a compromise. The government has tasked a joint committee of senators and MPs with seeking a deal. But it’s likely their text will be harsher than the initial draft, given that the Senate is dominated by the centre right — and this will be a problem for Macron’s left-leaning lawmakers.
If a compromise is not found, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally will be able to capitalize on Macron’s failure ahead of the European Parliament elections next June.
But even if the French president does manage to muddle through, the episode is likely to mark the end of his “neither left nor right” political offer. It also raises serious doubts about his ability to legislate on controversial topics.
Joe Biden, United States
The immigration crisis is one of the most vexing and longest-running domestic challenges for President Joe Biden. He came into office vowing to reverse the policies of his predecessor, Donald Trump, and build a “fair and humane” system, only to see Congress sit on his plan for comprehensive immigration reform.
U.S. President Joe Biden pauses as he gives a speech in Des Moines, Iowa on July 15, 2019 | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The White House has seen a deluge of migrants at the nation’s southern border, strained by a decades-old system unable to handle modern migration patterns.
Ahead of next year’s presidential election, Republicans have seized on the issue. GOP state leaders have filed lawsuits against the administration and sent busloads of migrants to Democrat-led cities, while in Washington, Republicans in Congress have tied foreign aid to sweeping changes to border policy, putting the White House in a tight spot as Biden officials now consider a slate of policies they once forcefully rejected.
The political pressure has spilled into the other aisle. States and cities, particularly ones led by Democrats, are pressuring Washington leaders to do more in terms of providing additional federal aid and revamping southern border policies to limit the flow of asylum seekers into the United States.
New York City has had more than 150,000 new arrivals over the past year and a half — forcing cuts to new police recruits, cutting library hours and limiting sanitation duties. Similar problems are playing out in cities like Chicago, which had migrants sleeping in buses or police stations.
The pressure from Democrats is straining their relationship with the White House. New York City Mayor Eric Adams runs the largest city in the nation, but hasn’t spoken with Biden in nearly a year. “We just need help, and we’re not getting that help,” Adams told reporters Tuesday.
Olaf Scholz, Germany
Migration has been at the top of the political agenda in Germany for months, with asylum applications rising to their highest levels since the 2015 refugee crisis triggered by Syria’s civil war.
The latest influx has posed a daunting challenge to national and local governments alike, which have struggled to find housing and other services for the migrants, not to mention the necessary funds.
The inability to limit the number of refugees has put German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under immense pressure | Michele Tantussi/Getty Images
The inability — in a country that ranks among the most coveted destinations for asylum seekers — to limit the number of refugees has put German Chancellor Olaf Scholz under immense pressure. In the hope of stemming the flow, Germany recently reinstated border checks with Poland, the Czech Republic and Switzerland, hoping to turn back the refugees before they hit German soil.
Even with border controls, refugee numbers remain high, which has been a boon to the far right. Germany’s anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party has reached record support in national polls.
Since overtaking Scholz’s Social Democrats in June, the AfD has widened its lead further, recording 22 percent in recent polls, second only to the center-right Christian Democrats.
The AfD is expected to sweep three state elections next September in eastern Germany, where support for the party and its reactionary anti-foreigner policies is particularly strong.
The center-right, meanwhile, is hardening its position on migration and turning its back on the open-border policies championed by former Chancellor Angela Merkel. Among the new priorities is a plan to follow the U.K.’s Rwanda model for processing refugees in third countries.
Karl Nehammer, Austria
Like Scholz, the Austrian leader’s approval ratings have taken a nosedive thanks to concerns over migration. Austria has taken steps to tighten controls at its southern and eastern borders.
Though the tactic has led to a drop in arrivals by asylum seekers, it also means Austria has effectively suspended the EU’s borderless travel regime, which has been a boon to the regional economy for decades.
Austria has effectively suspended the EU’s borderless travel regime, which has been a boon to the regional economy for decades | Thomas Kronsteiner/Getty Images
The far-right Freedom Party has had a commanding lead for more than a year, topping the ruling center-right in polls by 10 points. That puts the party in a position to win national elections scheduled for next fall, which would mark an unprecedented rightward tilt in a country whose politics have been dominated by the center since World War II.
Giorgia Meloni, Italy
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made her name in opposition, campaigning on a radical far-right agenda. Since winning power in last year’s election, she has shifted to more moderate positions on Ukraine and Europe.
Meloni now needs to appease her base on migration, a topic that has dominated Italian debate for years. Instead, however, she has been forced to grant visas to hundreds of thousands of legal migrants to cover labor shortages. Complicating matters, boat landings in Italy are up by about 50 per cent year-on-year despite some headline-grabbling policies and deals to stop arrivals.
While Meloni has ordered the construction of detention centers where migrants will be held pending repatriation, in reality local conditions in African countries and a lack of repatriation agreements present serious impediments.
Italy’s Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni at a press conference on March 9, 2023 | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images
Although she won the support of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for her cause, a potential EU naval mission to block departures from Africa would risk breaching international law.
Meloni has tried other options, including a deal with Tunisia to help stop migrant smuggling, but the plan fell apart before it began. A deal with Albania to offshore some migrant detention centers also ran into trouble.
Now Meloni is in a bind. The migration issue has brought her into conflict with France and Germany as she attempts to create a reputation as a moderate conservative.
If she fails to get to grips with the issue, she is likely to lose political ground. Her coalition partner Matteo Salvini is known as a hardliner on migration, and while they’re officially allies for now, they will be rivals again later.
Geert Wilders, the Netherlands
The government of long-serving Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was toppled over migration talks in July, after which he announced his exit from politics. In subsequent elections, in which different parties vied to fill Rutte’s void, far-right firebrand Geert Wilders secured a shock win. On election night he promised to curb the “asylum tsunami.”
Wilders is now seeking to prop up a center-right coalition with three other parties that have urged getting migration under control. One of them is Rutte’s old group, now led by Dilan Yeşilgöz.
Geert Wilders attends a meeting in the Dutch parliament with party leaders to discuss the formation of a coalition government, on November 24, 2023 | Carl Court/Getty Images
A former refugee, Yeşilgöz turned migration into one of the main topics of her campaign. She was criticized after the elections for paving the way for Wilders to win — not only by focusing on migration, but also by opening the door to potentially governing with Wilders.
Now, though, coalition talks are stuck, and it could take months to form a new cabinet. If Wilders, who clearly has a mandate from voters, can stitch a coalition together, the political trajectory of the Netherlands — generally known as a pragmatic nation — will shift significantly to the right. A crackdown on migration is as certain as anything can be.
Leo Varadkar, Ireland
Even in Ireland, an economically open country long used to exporting its own people worldwide, an immigration-friendly and pro-business government has been forced by rising anti-foreigner sentiment to introduce new migration deterrence measures that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.
Ireland’s hardening policies reflect both a chronic housing crisis and the growing reluctance of some property owners to keep providing state-funded emergency shelter in the wake of November riots in Dublin triggered by a North African immigrant’s stabbing of young schoolchildren.
A nation already housing more than 100,000 newcomers, mostly from Ukraine, Ireland has stopped guaranteeing housing to new asylum seekers if they are single men, chiefly from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Georgia and Somalia, according to the most recent Department of Integration statistics.
Ireland has stopped guaranteeing housing to new asylum seekers if they are single men, chiefly from Nigeria, Algeria, Afghanistan, Georgia and Somalia | Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images
Even newly arrived families face an increasing risk of being kept in military-style tents despite winter temperatures.
Ukrainians, who since Russia’s 2022 invasion of their country have received much stronger welfare support than other refugees, will see that welcome mat partially retracted in draft legislation approved this week by the three-party coalition government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.
Once enacted by parliament next month, the law will limit new Ukrainian arrivals to three months of state-paid housing, while welfare payments – currently among the most generous in Europe for people fleeing Russia’s war – will be slashed for all those in state-paid housing.
Justin Trudeau, Canada
A pessimistic public mood dragged down by cost-of-living woes has made immigration a multidimensional challenge for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
A housing crunch felt across the country has cooled support for immigration, with people looking for scapegoats for affordability pains. The situation has fueled antipathy for Trudeau and his re-election campaign.
Trudeau has treated immigration as a multipurpose solution for Canada’s aging population and slowing economy. And while today’s record-high population growth reflects well on Canada’s reputation as a desirable place to relocate, political challenges linked to migration have arisen in unpredictable ways for Trudeau’s Liberals.
Political challenges linked to migration have arisen in unpredictable ways for Trudeau’s Liberals | Andrej Ivanov/AFP
Since Trudeau came to power eight years ago, at least 1.3 million people have immigrated to Canada, mostly from India, the Philippines, China and Syria. Handling diaspora politics — and foreign interference — has become more consequential, as seen by Trudeau’s clash with India and Canada’s recent break with Israel.
Canada will double its 40 million population in 25 years if the current growth rate holds, enlarging the political challenges of leading what Trudeau calls the world’s “first postnational state”.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain
Spain’s autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in Northern Africa, are favored by migrants seeking to enter Europe from the south: Once they make it across the land border, the Continent can easily be accessed by ferry.
Transit via the land border that separates the European territory from Morocco is normally kept in check with security measures like high, razor-topped fences, with border control officers from both countries working together to keep undocumented migrants out.
Spain’s autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in Northern Africa, are favored by migrants seeking to enter Europe | Pierre-Philippe Marcou/AFP
But in recent years authorities in Morocco have expressed displeasure with their Spanish counterparts by standing down their officers and allowing hundreds of migrants to pass, overwhelming border stations and forcing Spanish officers to repel the migrants, with scores dying in the process.
The headaches caused by these incidents are believed to be a major factor in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s decision to change the Spanish government’s position on the disputed Western Sahara territory and express support for Rabat’s plan to formalize its nearly 50-year occupation of the area.
The pivot angered Sánchez’s leftist allies and worsened Spain’s relationship with Algeria, a long-standing champion of Western Saharan independence. But the measures have stopped the flow of migrants — for now.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece
Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s migration crisis since 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people entered Europe via the Aegean islands. Migration and border security have been key issues in the country’s political debate.
Human rights organizations, as well as the European Parliament and the European Commission, have accused the Greek conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis of illegal “pushbacks” of migrants who have made it to Greek territory — and of deporting migrants without due process. Greece’s government denies those accusations, arguing that independent investigations haven’t found any proof.
Mitsotakis insists that Greece follows a “tough but fair” policy, but the numerous in-depth investigations belie the moderate profile the conservative leader wants to maintain.
In June, a migrant boat sank in what some called “the worst tragedy ever” in the Mediterranean Sea. Hundreds lost their lives, refocusing Europe’s attention on the issue. Official investigations have yet to discover whether failures by Greek authorities contributed to the shipwreck, according to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In the meantime, Greece is in desperate need of thousands of workers to buttress the country’s understaffed agriculture, tourism and construction sectors. Despite pledges by the migration and agriculture ministers of imminent legislation bringing migrants to tackle the labor shortage, the government was forced to retreat amid pressure from within its own ranks.
Nikos Christodoulides, Cyprus
Cyprus is braced for an increase in migrant arrivals on its shores amid renewed conflict in the Middle East. Earlier in December, Greece sent humanitarian aid to the island to deal with an anticipated increase in flows.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides has called for extra EU funding for migration management, and is contending with a surge in violence against migrants in Cyprus. Analysts blame xenophobia, which has become mainstream in Cypriot politics and media, as well as state mismanagement of migration flows. Last year the country recorded the EU’s highest proportion of first-time asylum seekers relative to its population.
Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides has called for extra EU funding for migration management | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images
Legal and staffing challenges have delayed efforts to create a deputy ministry for migration, deemed an important step in helping Cyprus to deal with the surge in arrivals.
The island’s geography — it’s close to both Lebanon and Turkey — makes it a prime target for migrants wanting to enter EU territory from the Middle East. Its complex history as a divided country also makes it harder to regulate migrant inflows.
Tim Ross, Annabelle Dickson, Clea Caulcutt, Myah Ward, Matthew Karnitschnig, Hannah Roberts, Pieter Haeck, Shawn Pogatchnik, Zi-Ann Lum, Aitor Hernández-Morales and Nektaria Stamouli
