Last week the leader of Austria’s Jewish community took the unprecedented step of endorsing a candidate. To win in the re-run election, Hofer needs to turn around a 31,000-vote deficit from the May result. Miriam Singer, a bookseller working in the shop at Vienna’s Jewish museum, said she would endorse Van der Bellen because she considered the Freedom party “unelectable”. A rise in immigration from Russia and eastern Europe means that political attitudes in Vienna’s Jewish community are increasingly as complex as those in the rest of the country. But Peham questioned whether the Freedom party had convincingly cut ties with its antisemitic past.

Source: The Guardian December 03, 2016 19:52 UTC