Austria. Scoperta la macchina del fango della SPÖ. Con le mani nella marmellata.

Giuseppe Sandro Mela.

2017-10-09.

«Chancellor denies knowledge of sites of antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy theories, allegedly run by former adviser.»

Giuda era un galantuomo affidabile, onesto e di parola.

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Il 15 ottobre l’Austria andrà alle urne per le elezioni politiche. Già lo scorso anno l’Austria ci aveva abituati all’idea che lì le elezioni se le fanno in modo casereccio.

Questa volta però si son dati da fare su scala industriale. Sulla faccenda è stato sollevato un orribile polverone, che rende difficile persino il cercare di ricostruire cosa sia successo effettivamente. L’unica cosa certa sembrerebbe essere il fatto che almeno questa volta Mr Putin non dovrebbe entrarci, o, se ci fosse entrato, lo avrebbe fatto più che bene.

Diamo prima la versione fornita dal Guardian.

«Austria’s centre-left chancellor is battling allegations that his party paid for a group of websites churning out xenophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to discredit his main challenger in the eyes of far-right supporters»

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«The scandal, which has rocked Austrian politics two weeks before the country goes to the polls to elect a new government, centres on at least two Facebook sites dedicated to the centre-right foreign minister and candidate for chancellor, Sebastian Kurz.»

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«One of them, called The Truth About Sebastian Kurz, which had about 16,000 followers, posted Photoshopped images and video clips accusing the politician of secretly paving the way for a new wave of immigration from Islamic countries, and of being part of the “dubious political network” of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros.»

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«Another site, For Sebastian Kurz, masqueraded as a website run by supporters of the Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) candidate but published controversial content such as a poll on whether the government should close its border on the Brenner pass in the light of NGOs allegedly threatening to smuggle thousands of migrants from Italy into Austria.»

*

«Kurz, who has campaigned on a promise to strengthen the EU’s outer borders and end rescues of refugees in the Mediterranean, is leading in opinion polls by a considerable margin and is widely expected to be become his country’s youngest ever head of government, at the age of 31, after elections on 15 October.»

*

«Over the weekend the investigative magazine Profil alleged that the two websites targeting Kurz were run not by rightwing or far-right activists but by a former adviser to Austria’s current chancellor, Christian Kern, of the Social Democratic party for Austria (SPÖ).»

*

«Kern hired Tal Silberstein, an Israeli political adviser, for a fee of €400,000 to mastermind his election campaign. But Silberstein was fired from the chancellor’s team on 14 August after being investigated over alleged money laundering in Israel. He denies wrongdoing in the Israeli case. Austrian media allege that Silberstein’s team continued to operate the websites even after the party had cut ties with him.»

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«The SPÖ general secretary and campaign manager, Georg Niedermühlbichler, resigned on Saturday in the immediate wake of the revelations around the so-called Schmutzkübel (dirt bucket) campaign.»

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Cercando di riassumere, la SPÖ avrebbe generato siti internet per spargere ogni tipo di menzogna e calunnia sul conto del candidato cancelliere dell’ÖVP. L’FPÖ non ci entrerebbe proprio per nulla.

Di seguito riportiamo altre versioni.

«The number 2 figure in Austria’s ruling SPÖ is resigning over a smear campaign against the main conservative party’s leader, adding to a sense of disarray on the center-left of politics weeks before the elections.»

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«Austria’s election campaign has been rocked by a massive scandal when it was disovered that the ruling party of Chancellor Christian Kern had attacked its biggest challenger on Facebook using xenophobic memes and conspiracy theories.»

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«News reports in recent days have forced the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) to admit that one of its paid staffers was involved in covertly setting up Facebook pages that sought to discredit conservative front-runner Sebastian Kurz.»

*

«On Saturday, Austrian magazine Profil revealed that two Facebook pages used to attack and discredit Sebastian Kurz were linked to a former SPÖ election advisor named Tal Silberstein.»

*

«Silberstein is one of Israel’s most prominent political consultants, advising leaders across the political spectrum from Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon and, more recently, prime minister Binyamin Netanjahu and Ukraine’s Yulia Tymoshenko, the Irish Times noted.»

*

«Tal Silberstein, who is linked to billionaire Beny Steinmetz and battling money-laundering allegations in Israel, allegedly used anti-Semitism in a bid to keep the chancellorship with the Social Democrats»

*

«The Social Democrats dismissed Silberstein in August after he was detained and questioned in Israel along with billionaire businessman Benny Steinmetz in a fraud investigation.»

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Ad inquinare le elezioni non era il solito Mr Putin, bensì gli amichetti socialdemocratici ed il loro mentore magiaro – americano, che si stavano esercitando in attesa di dare il meglio di sé stessi al momento dello spoglio.

Lasciano quindi molto, ma molto, perplessi i risultati delle proiezioni della Ogm, pubblicati pochi giorni or sono. Gli svarioni delle previsioni sulle elezioni tedesche sono troppo recenti per essere stati dimenticati.

L’SPÖ balzerebbe al 27% dal pregresso 22%: un guadagno di cinque punti percentuali, mentre l’FPÖ scenderebbe dal 27% al 25%.

Austria. Laboratorio politico europeo dei nuovi sommovimenti.

Austria. La demonizzazione dell’Fpö.

Austria. Corte Costituzionale annulla le elezioni.

Austria. Corte Costituzionale. Appurati i brogli elettorali.

Diciamo pure che gli austriaci sanno bene come far svolgere le elezioni.

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→ Haaretz. 2017-10-08. Embroiled Israeli Spin Doctor Rocks Austria With ‘anti-Semitic’ Campaign Against Chancellor Candidate

Tal Silberstein, who is linked to billionaire Beny Steinmetz and battling money-laundering allegations in Israel, allegedly used anti-Semitism in a bid to keep the chancellorship with the Social Democrats.

*

Political consultant Tal Silberstein is at the center of a scandal that has roiled Austrian politics ahead of the country’s October…

[Testo riportato parzialmente causa il copyright]

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→ Janes. 2017-10-02. Revelations around smear campaign against ÖVP candidate Kurz likely to reduce SPÖ’s voter support in Austrian general election

On Saturday (30 September), Georg Niedermühlbichler, the chairman and campaign manager of one of Austria’s two ruling coalition parties, the centre-left Austrian Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs: SPÖ), resigned following revelations that a former SPÖ adviser had staged a smear campaign against Sebastian Kurz, the top candidate for chancellor of the current junior coalition partner, the centre-right Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei: ÖVP).

The campaign included fake Facebook groups allegedly linking Kurz to right-wing supporters. Ahead of the early general election on 15 October, the SPÖ is currently competing for second place behind the ÖVP with the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs: FPÖ), which has performed well in recent polls.

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→ Free West Media. 2017-10-04. Dirty campaign bombshell rocks Austria ahead of elections

Austria’s election campaign has been rocked by a massive scandal when it was disovered that the ruling party of Chancellor Christian Kern had attacked its biggest challenger on Facebook using xenophobic memes and conspiracy theories.

*

News reports in recent days have forced the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) to admit that one of its paid staffers was involved in covertly setting up Facebook pages that sought to discredit conservative front-runner Sebastian Kurz.

On Saturday, Austrian magazine Profil revealed that two Facebook pages used to attack and discredit Sebastian Kurz were linked to a former SPÖ election advisor named Tal Silberstein.

Silberstein is one of Israel’s most prominent political consultants, advising leaders across the political spectrum from Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon and, more recently, prime minister Binyamin Netanjahu and Ukraine’s Yulia Tymoshenko, the Irish Times noted.

Silberstein has business interests in property and mining across Guinea, Angola and Sierra Leone and one of his firms appeared in the Panama Papers scandal, involving property deals that cost the Bucharest government more than $160 million. In March an international arrest warrant was issued in his name.

The SPÖ has been trying to diminish Silberstein’s role in the election campaign since his arrest, but documents show that he had set up an office in Vienna that had planned and carried out dirty campaigns for the party. The employees were still active and ran the Facebook pages until very recently.

The media reports about the Facebook ruse from its Israeli campaign advisor, Silberstein, has not been disputed by the ruling party, suggesting that they have hard substance. The Social Democrats (SPÖ) have promised an investigation into social media posts attacking rival Sebastian Kurz, but have denied knowing that they had been put online.

The pages called “We for Sebastian Kurz” and “The Truth About Sebastian Kurz” claimed that the US investor George Soros was behind Kurz in attempt to link Kurz to the globalist elite. The SPÖ cut ties with Silberstein in August after he was caught up in the international money laundering probe in Israel. He had conducted polling and public policy research for the ruling party.

The revelations about fake Facebook accounts that smeared candidates in Austria’s election race have dealt a severe blow to social democratic Chancellor Kern’s efforts to prevent a shift to the right in the coming parliamentary vote on 15 October.

On Sunday evening, five of the leading candidates in the election took part in a live TV debate. The Facebook scandal cast a huge shadow over the debate with the FPÖ’s Heinz-Christian Strache saying: “This is no longer a Silberstein issue. This is a Kern issue.”

The party’s new campaign manager, Christoph Matznetter, admitted on Monday, two days after his predecessor resigned due to the scandal, that “with 14 days to go to the election, the SPÖ is faced with more than a depressing situation”. The Kronen Zeitung, Austria’s biggest tabloid, similarly declared: “The SPÖ is going down in total chaos.”

Christoph Matznetter, whom Kern had put in charge of investigating the affair, told Austrian radio show Ö1 Morgenjournal on Monday: “We woke up in the middle of a tsunami.”

“This is not our style, we don’t want this type of politics,” Matznetter said, claiming that he and other senior party members were not aware of the Facebook pages. He promised that the results of his investigation would be published before the election on October 15, Kleine Zeitung reported.

Kern is lagging behind Foreign Minister Kurz in polls, as the conservative People’s Party leader dominated the race with his tough policy proposals on immigration and asylum seekers.

One of the fake Facebook accounts contained overtly racist and anti-semitic content, apparently designed to look as if they were posted by “far-right” or “extremist” Freedom Party (FPÖ) sympathisers.

On Saturday, Georg Niedermühlbichler, who had been on the SPÖ’s executive board, resigned. The Freedom Party described Niedermühlbichler as a “sacrificial lamb” and urged Kern to step down, according to a report in the German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Kern’s party has been in third place in recent polls, at 24 percent, with Kurz’s ÖVP on 33 percent and the FPÖ on 26 percent.

Kurz noted on Facebook: “We don’t want to cast aspersions on others but . . . I warned many times about Silberstein’s problematic past and dirty campaigning methods.”

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→ Germerica. 2017-10-02. Top Austrian Socialist resigns over smear campaign

The Social Democrats had denied having any connection with two websites making unsubstantiated allegations against 31-year-old Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz, who took over the conservative People’s Party (OVP) in May. Since Kurz took up his post, his party has topped the opinion polls.

But Austrian newspaper Die Presse and weekly magazine Profil reported on Saturday that a former adviser to the Social Democrats who was dismissed this summer was originally behind the sites and that they had been kept in operation.

At a hastily convened news conference on Saturday, Georg Niedermühlbichler, the Social Democrats’ chairman and campaign manager, said that until recently he had been unaware of any connection with the websites.

Georg Niedermühlbichler (l.) and Christian Kern arriving at the studios of  the broadcaster ORF to participate in the annual summer talks on September 4, 2017, in Vienna

Although the party never paid for or commissioned the websites, he said, he had discovered that one member of his staff had been aware of work on them.

“It is my duty as election campaign manager to ensure that such things do not happen. They happened. I will therefore assume the consequences as campaign manager and as party chairman,” he said.

Niedermühlbichler’s resignation adds to the troubles of a party that is now competing with the far-right Freedom Party for second place in the polls, well behind Kurz’s OVP, ahead of a parliamentary election on Oct. 15.

The Social Democrats are also at loggerheads with the OVP, in a country where parties rarely have enough votes to govern alone.

The Freedom Party said Niedermühlbichler’s resignation was not enough and that the party leader, Christian Kern, should also step down.

Niedermühlbichler appeared to blame Tal Silberstein, an Israeli political adviser who worked for the party until recently, for the websites. Profil and Die Presse also reported that he was originally behind them.

The Social Democrats dismissed Silberstein in August after he was detained and questioned in Israel along with billionaire businessman Benny Steinmetz in a fraud investigation.

“It was certainly a big mistake to hire Tal Silberstein,” he added.

Shortly before Niedermühlbichler’s announcement, tabloid daily Ósterreich published an interview with Silberstein in which it said he had declined to comment on the allegations about a smear campaign but said the party was right to sack him.

On Saturday, Israel was observing Yom Kippur, when the country effectively shuts down for a day.

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→ Guardian. 2017-10-08. Negative campaign sites scandal shakes up Austrian election race

Chancellor denies knowledge of sites of antisemitic and xenophobic conspiracy theories, allegedly run by former adviser.

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Austria’s centre-left chancellor is battling allegations that his party paid for a group of websites churning out xenophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to discredit his main challenger in the eyes of far-right supporters.

The scandal, which has rocked Austrian politics two weeks before the country goes to the polls to elect a new government, centres on at least two Facebook sites dedicated to the centre-right foreign minister and candidate for chancellor, Sebastian Kurz.

One of them, called The Truth About Sebastian Kurz, which had about 16,000 followers, posted Photoshopped images and video clips accusing the politician of secretly paving the way for a new wave of immigration from Islamic countries, and of being part of the “dubious political network” of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros.

Another site, For Sebastian Kurz, masqueraded as a website run by supporters of the Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) candidate but published controversial content such as a poll on whether the government should close its border on the Brenner pass in the light of NGOs allegedly threatening to smuggle thousands of migrants from Italy into Austria.

Kurz, who has campaigned on a promise to strengthen the EU’s outer borders and end rescues of refugees in the Mediterranean, is leading in opinion polls by a considerable margin and is widely expected to be become his country’s youngest ever head of government, at the age of 31, after elections on 15 October.

Over the weekend the investigative magazine Profil alleged that the two websites targeting Kurz were run not by rightwing or far-right activists but by a former adviser to Austria’s current chancellor, Christian Kern, of the Social Democratic party for Austria (SPÖ).

Kern hired Tal Silberstein, an Israeli political adviser, for a fee of €400,000 to mastermind his election campaign. But Silberstein was fired from the chancellor’s team on 14 August after being investigated over alleged money laundering in Israel. He denies wrongdoing in the Israeli case. Austrian media allege that Silberstein’s team continued to operate the websites even after the party had cut ties with him.

Silberstein extolled the virtues of negative campaigning in the 2005 documentary Our Brand is Crisis, about the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. Then working for the US pollster Stanley Greenberg’s team of advisers, Silberstein was caught on camera telling the candidate Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to “start negative campaigns” against his main rival without being seen as the campaign’s instigator. “We have to make him from clean to a dirty candidate, that’s our task,” he was heard to say.

In Austria, which has a multi-party system and proportional representation, openly negative campaigning has traditionally been taboo.

The SPÖ general secretary and campaign manager, Georg Niedermühlbichler, resigned on Saturday in the immediate wake of the revelations around the so-called Schmutzkübel (dirt bucket) campaign.

Kern has said he was unaware of the Facebook sites, which he described as “amoral and incredibly stupid” – a denial supported by Silberstein himself.

“The chancellor did not even have the slightest bit of knowledge or information,” Silberstein told Austrian media. “It is now part of the opposition’s own negative campaign to accuse the chancellor and the SPÖ.” Officially, he had been commissioned to analyse and interpret polling data, he said.

Kern announced on Sunday that his party would release Silberstein’s contract to the public, but by Wednesday evening it had not done so.

Silberstein has not denied running the sites in interviews with Austrian media and said that rather than negative campaigning his intention was to gather data and test out different messages. “The strange thing is that people from other parties have been used to steal information, and everyone gets worked up about the Facebook sites,” he reportedly said.

As early as July, Kurz’s ÖVP had asked Facebook to delete posts from the two sites, but neither went offline until after Saturday’s revelations in the media.

A third site, The Truth About Christian Kern, targets the incumbent chancellor, though a social media analyst quoted in Die Presse newspaper said it was unlikely to be run by the same people.

Facebook has so far declined to comment specifically on the scandal that could influence the outcome of the Austrian elections, stating only that there are “well-functioning processes” for lodging complaints.