With some delay, the Ministry of the Interior presented the report for the protection of the constitution for 2020 on Wednesday, the year in which the serious Islamist terrorist attack in Vienna took place. In the reporting year, this area represented “a sustained and high threat to Austria,” it said. Right-wing extremist-motivated crimes decreased, but “new-right” groups used the Corona measures protests as a stage.
The paper, for which Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) was still responsible as Minister of the Interior, shows that Austria was not one of the countries most at risk from a terrorist attack in the EU up to November 2, 2020, the date of the attack, but it was compared to those countries with a disproportionately high number of “Foreign Terrorist Fighters” (FTF) of 334 at the end of the year in relation to the number of inhabitants.
The “Operation Luxor” raids on November 9, 2020 against the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas are also mentioned. In the light of radicalization via social media and other relevant Internet channels with Islamist and jihadist content, the report sees potential threats with regard to acts of violence mainly among radicalized individual activists and potential copycats.
In the area of right-wing extremism, the Ministry of the Interior recorded a decrease in criminal offenses. Nationwide, 1,364 offenses were reported, 18.7 percent fewer than in 2019 (1,678 offenses); this in the case of 895 right-wing extremist, xenophobic/racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, unspecific or other acts.
There is talk of a consolidation of the personnel and organizational changes in right-wing extremist organizations that began in 2019. “Long-term leaders of the domestic, organized right-wing extremist scene were able to use their structures and networks again, in order to sometimes also appear in public,” says the report.
Mention is made of the Corona protests: “In the 2020 reporting year, the ideologues of the New Right recognized early on that the COVID-19 pandemic is suitable for changing their own conspiracy-narrative worldview from the ‘Great Exchange’ to the ‘Great Reset’ – the one by COVID-19 is supposed to take place – to transform.” Dystopian end-time scenarios would be designed. “Using the protests against the COVID-19 measures, the New Right were ultimately able to reach new sections of the population with their propaganda. A trend that will continue in the coming year,” according to the constitutional protection officers.
Left-wing extremism is also mentioned in the report in connection with Corona. It is “obvious that left-wing extremist actors, who at the beginning of the pandemic were still trying to have a say in the protest against the federal government under the pretext of criticizing the COVID-19 Measures Act, are increasingly taking a position as critical observers of the anti-COVID-19 rallying movements – especially with regard to the actions of right-wing extremist circles within these movements – have taken”.
A total of 167 crimes with proven or suspected left-wing extremist motives were documented (2019: 218 crimes), whereby one crime can include several offenses with separate reports. Twelve acts, that is 7.2 percent, could be cleared up. 257 reports were filed nationwide (2019: 311 reports).
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Combating Terrorism (BVT), which was merged into the new Directorate for State Security and Intelligence (DSN) at the end of the previous year, was responsible for the report for the last time. The publication has been delayed because the treatment in the responsible subcommittee had been postponed – a reason that the SPÖ considers questionable, as was emphasized to the APA. Some things are to change in the report for 2021, it is to be published earlier and the reintroduction of a separate right-wing extremism report has already been decided.