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| Sebastian Kurz Austria's new political leader |
She declined to comment on which coalition arrangement she wanted to see, but said the Freedom Party's strength would be a "major challenge" for its Austrian rivals.
Merkel said the challenge posed by the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany was "manageable" compared with the FPÖ's strength. She hoped for close cooperation with Kurz at the European level.
Hungary's foreign minister Peter Szijjarto was full of praise for his Austrian counterpart and "friend" Kurz, who at 31 is expected to become Europe's youngest national leader following an election victory on Sunday.
"He's hijacked neither by hypocrisy nor by political correctness. He's always honest, he's always very direct and I think it's very necessary currently, that European leaders speak directly," Szijjarto told reporters in Brussels.
Szijjarto welcomed Kurz's stance on migration as close to that of Budapest and expected Austria to work more closely with anti-immigration eastern and central European states including Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. East-West divides over migration policy have strained unity in the bloc.
Note EU-Digest:
It is sad to see that some of the Governments of the EU's Eastern and Central European States, occupied by the Nazi's in the second world war, " indirectly" seem to have copied some of the policies and laws of their former Nazi occupiers, particularly in relation to some of their present immigration policies.
These laws were implemented in Nazi Germany and their occupied territories (1933–45) based on a specific racist and religious doctrine, asserting the superiority of the Aryan race, which claimed scientific legitimacy.
The Nazi laws qualified Muslims, Africans and other minorities as "Untermenschen (sub-humans)" . It is important for the EU Parliament and EU Commission to make clear, that laws by EU member states, which ban immigrants from entering into the EU, based on their ethnicity or religion, in any way or form, should not be allowed to see the light of day..
