All against blue – election postponed: fuss over FPÖ right-wing man Graf

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The Main Committee of the National Council on Wednesday postponed a decision on the composition of the Supervisory Board of the National Fund of the Republic – because the FPÖ proposed Martin Graf instead of Dagmar Belakowitsch. Graf is a member of the Olympia brotherhood, which is classified as far right. However, the task of the National Fund is to support victims of National Socialism. Therefore, all other parties opposed Graf’s placement and postponed the elections.

According to parliamentary correspondence, this was an unusual occurrence. The FPÖ also complained of a break with the practice of the House of Representatives, according to which each parliamentary group could nominate members independently. It was equally unusual for National Council President Wolfgang Sobotka (ÖVP) to call to order two FPÖ deputies as committee chairman – the first, according to Sobotka, to ever sit on the main committee.

Leichtfried: ‘Nomination Graf is a provocation’
Sobotka had formally submitted the election proposal for Graf, but the freestyle was postponed with a large majority of the ÖVP, Greens, SPÖ and NEOS. Graf’s nomination was a provocation, said SPÖ deputy club boss Jörg Leichtfried, a mockery of the victims of National Socialism and their families.

“Do not go”
For Martin Engelberg (ÖVP) it is a “no go” to nominate someone like Martin Graf for such a task. Because he is a member of the Olympia brotherhood, which is classified as right-wing extremist by the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW) – where right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis and historical revisionists are regular guests.

Eva Blimlinger (Greens) argued that it was not reasonable for the victims of National Socialism and their surviving relatives that a member of parliament “experienced with right-wing extremism” had a voice in the National Fund.

Like Nikolaus Scherak (NEOS), she remembered the protest of the Israeli religious community when Martin Graf, as the third chairman of the National Council (2008 to 2013), was a legal member of the supervisory board: the IKG chairman at the time suspended his position on the Board of Trustees; The president of the National Council, Barbara Prammer (SPÖ), refused to appoint Graf to the committee that decides on the granting of benefits to Nazi victims.

Wolfgang Gerstl (ÖVP) stressed that the decision to go ahead contrary to the usual procedure in Parliament was not an easy one. After all, the election proposal is not rejected, but only postponed. This is intended to give the FPÖ the opportunity to reconsider their nomination. Leichtfried also appealed to the FPÖ to nominate another person.

Belakovich: “Left-wing terror in its purest form”
It didn’t look like that on Wednesday, however: deputy club leader Belakowitsch criticized in a broadcast that the FPÖ wanted to be stripped of the right to nominate – and was outraged both by the “left-wing terror in its purest form” and by the fact that the Greens were denigrating ‘Graf as a right-wing extremist. In the committee she explained that she did not understand where the provocation lay.

Her parliamentary colleague Christian Hafenecker suspected that the background to the discussion was that Blimlinger was ashamed of the coalition with the ÖVP, which he associated with corruption. For this statement, Sobotka gave him, as he said, the first call to order in the history of the main commission. A second was sent to Belakowitsch saying that the “opinion fear is now more important than the practices in the house”.

Source: Krone

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