Migrant Crimes Add Volatile Element to Austria’s Electio
By any measure, the string of crimes has been terrible. A grandmother of three, walking her dog, raped along a riverbank. A 10-year-old boy sexually assaulted at a public swimming pool. A 21-year-old student gang raped near the giant Ferris wheel at Vienna’s famed Prater park. A 54-year-old woman beaten to death on the street.
The fact that the crimes were committed by recent migrants from war zones and an immigrant who had lived illegally in the country for years added an especially volatile element to the political climate ahead of the presidential election on Sunday, when Austria could become the first European country to elect a far-right candidate as head of state since the end of Nazism.
At least 90,000 people applied for asylum in this country of 8.4 million before Austria’s government shut its borders and persuaded all the Balkan states, through which the migrants trekked from Greece, to follow suit.
But especially grim acts, starting with the rape of the grandmother in September, have been hashed over with increasing intensity, feeding the anti-migrant sentiment that helped propel Mr. Hofer to first place in the first round last month.
The man accused of attacking her mother, an Afghan who was caught some weeks later, denied his actions until D.N.A. evidence identified him.
he was a minor when he committed the crime, to 20 months in jail for the rape and stealing a pack of cigarettes. That sentence, while in line with treatment of minors in Austria, was ridiculed by one of Ms. Bubis’s lawyers, Dietmar Heck, as too mild.
Mr. Mahrer said some of these young migrants had arrived from war zones, with completely un-Western views about women.
“They do not respect the same things we do,” Mr. Mahrer said. But, he asked, are foreign offenders less equal before the law than Austrians?
A measure of how widespread calls for “zero tolerance” have become came in the last TV debate between the two presidential candidates. Mr. Van der Bellen said episodes like the assaults on women in Cologne required a tough response “because that is an attempt to occupy a certain public space, and that we won’t countenance.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/w...=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
