Spain to reopen borders on 21 June but other countries are adopting more targeted approach
France and Germany became the latest European countries to reopen their borders as the continent emerges from its three-month Covid-19 lockdown.
Speaking on Sunday evening, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said the country’s Schengen borders would be open from Monday and its non-EU borders from 1 July.
Continue reading...Conversion of building where Nazi leader was born will cost €5m and be completed in 2022
Austrian authorities have unveiled a design for turning the house where Adolf Hitler was born into a police station – while trying to make it unattractive as a pilgrimage site for people who glorify the Nazi dictator.
A design by Austrian architects Marte.Marte beat 11 competitors in an interior ministry tender, officials said on Tuesday. The refurbishment is expected to be completed around the end of 2022 and will cost about €5m (£4.5m).
Continue reading...Restaurants reopen in parts of Germany, while Italy relaxes travel restrictions
Europe took a step towards post-virus normality on Friday when restaurants in Germany and Austria reopened for the first time in two months, and other countries loosened travel restrictions and threw open borders.
Berlin’s restaurants, cafes and snack kiosks were allowed to serve customers again, so long as they obeyed social distancing. People from two separate households could share a table, but had to keep a distance of 1.5m from each other.
Continue reading...Ski resort that became European coronavirus hotspot plans to switch to a more ‘upmarket apres-ski culture’
The Alpine ski resort of Ischgl, at the centre of Austria’s biggest cluster of coronavirus infections, has said it wants to move away from “party tourism” as it emerged from more than a month under quarantine.
Ischgl is near the point where Austria, Italy and Switzerland meet and has described itself as the “Ibiza of the Alps”. It is now clear that more than 800 cases spread across Austria can be traced back to the resort and the surrounding Paznaun valley.
Continue reading...Health minister says Germany will produce 50m face masks a week by the summer
Germany has declared its coronavirus outbreak under control as it prepares to take its first tentative steps out of lockdown next week, while several European countries unveiled contact-tracing mobile apps aimed at facilitating a gradual return to a more normal life.
The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said on Friday that the virus was under control in Europe’s largest economy, thanks to confinement measures imposed after an early surge in cases. “The infection numbers have sunk significantly, especially the relative day-by-day increase,” he said.
Continue reading...Compromise reached after Netherlands relents on ‘economic surveillance’ of beneficiary nations
A messy compromise to unlock €500bn (£438bn) of EU support for countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic has been struck after Italy’s prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, warned that the existence of the bloc was at stake.
EU finance ministers on a video conference call struck a deal late on Thursday after the Netherlands shifted on a demand for “economic surveillance” of countries benefiting from €240bn of credit lines via the European stability mechanism, a bailout fund for struggling member states.
Continue reading...Europe now centre of pandemic, says WHO, as Spain prepares for state of emergency
The World Health Organization has stepped up its calls for intensified action to fight the coronavirus pandemic, imploring countries “not to let this fire burn”, as Spain said it would declare a 15-day state of emergency from Saturday.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said Europe – where the virus is present in all 27 EU states and has infected 25,000 people – had become the centre of the epidemic, with more reported cases and deaths than the rest of the world combined apart from China.
Continue reading...Five killed on Sunday morning in Dachstein range, sixth person killed in Carinthia region
Avalanches have killed six people in Austria in two separate incidents, police say.
At least five people were swept away on Sunday morning by a large avalanche on a mountain in upper Austria. The victims were part of a group walking in snow shoes on the Dachstein range.
Continue reading...I’ve suffered death threats and racial abuse, but this is my party’s chance to shape policy for the better
Shaking the hand of the Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, during my inauguration as Austria’s justice minister in January was a profoundly moving moment for me and for my family. But it was moving also for a great many people who came to Austria as migrants or refugees. To see a former child refugee from the Bosnian war sworn in as a government minister in the country to which her family fled in 1995 was for many hugely symbolic – a signal that they, too, had now been fully accepted as part of Austrian society, with the right to participate in the country’s politics and even to shape it.
But from day one, becoming the embodiment of this acceptance also unleashed a torrent of hate directed at me from the right and from proponents of the far right in Austria. Resentments that had been held down over years resurfaced. In just two months, the Austrian authorities have recorded more than 25,500 incidents of publicly made hate speech and hate comments directed at or about me, from racist insults to calls to go back where I came from. Because some of these messages included credible death threats, the Austrian security services issued me with 24-hour protection. “A bullet is reserved for you,” one of these messages said.
Continue reading...Sophie Grau and Iris Klopfer say they are continuing rather than destroying event’s 200-year-old traditions
The first same-sex couple to dance at Vienna’s Opera Ball say they are continuing rather than destroying the event’s 200-year-old traditions, since they are “good dancers and stick to the dress code”.
Sophie Grau and Iris Klopfer, both students from Germany, have been accepted to join the procession of 288 young “debutantes” who will dance their first waltz at the Viennese society event on 20 February.
Continue reading...Untested left-right alliance may prove template for future coalition in Germany
Members of Austria’s Green party voted on Saturday to join a new government led by the conservative former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, clearing the final hurdle for an untested national left-right alliance.
The coalition pact approved by their party leadership and Kurz’s People’s party earlier this week was backed by 93% of Green delegates . Out of 264 delegates, only 15 voted against or abstained.
Continue reading...Sebastian Kurz, who leads the People’s party, can now return to power with small majority
Austria’s main centre-right party and the Greens have agreed on a coalition deal that will return ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to power.
Both Kurz and Werner Kogler from the Greens, who led the negotiations between the two parties, told reporters in Vienna they had hammered out a government programme that will be presented to the public in detail on Thursday afternoon.
Continue reading...Police record rising violence and drunkenness in relation to traditional folkloric festivities
Goat-horned half-demons with scraggy coats of fur, lolling tongues and threatening bundles of birch branches are no one’s idea of a welcome guest on a winter’s night.
In Austria, however, the figure of the Krampus has been part of pre-Christmas folklore for centuries, with men in costumes roaming the streets to scare children and grownups from the end of November to the middle of December.
Continue reading...The house where Adolf Hitler was born will be turned into a police station, Austria’s interior ministry has announced, after years of legal wrangling as the government looks to prevent the building from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.
The yellow corner house in the northern town of Braunau on the border with Germany, where Hitler was born on 20 April 1889, was taken into government control in 2016.
Continue reading...Freedom party’s vote collapses to 16%, as others stall in Italy, Spain, France and elsewhere
The slump in support for the nationalist Freedom party (FPÖ) in Austria’s elections on Sunday is the latest indication that if the tide has not turned against Europe’s far-right populists, it does seem – for the time being, at least – to have stopped rising.
Sebastian Kurz’s conservative People’s party (ÖVP) won 37.1% of the vote, its best score since 2002, while the share held by FPÖ, until May his junior coalition partner in government, collapsed to 16.1%, down a full 10 percentage points.
Continue reading...Sebastian Kurz looks certain to reclaim his title of world’s youngest leader as his ÖVP takes 37%
Support for Austria’s Freedom party (FPÖ) has plunged by more than a third as voters punished the far-right group in national elections for a corruption scandal that brought down the government.
The former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, 33, looks certain to reclaim his position as the youngest leader in the world after his conservative People’s party (ÖVP) secured 37.1% of the vote – its best result since 2002.
Continue reading...Centre-right former leader Sebastian Kurz poised to return to power
Austria’s centre-right ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz looks likely to return to power only four months after a video sting operation brought down his coalition government with the nationalist right.
Kurz’s Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) is expected to come out top when 6.4 million Austrians head to the polls this Sunday, but may have to consider forging unorthodox alliances after the “Ibiza scandal” reconfigured the Alpine country’s political landscape.
Continue reading...Visitor posted on Booking.com and Tripadvisor about disgust at pictures in Austria
A German man is being sued by the owners of a four-star hotel in Austria after posting online reviews in which he criticised them for decorating their lobby with a portrait of a “Nazi grandpa” in a uniform adorned with a swastika.
The man, named in court documents as Thomas K, and his wife visited the hotel in the village of Gerlos in the Tyrolean Alps last August. After check-in, they noticed two framed pictures on a wall near the hotel’s entrance, hung above a flower arrangement. One showed a young man wearing a uniform with an eagle and swastika badge, the other an older man.
Continue reading...Centre-right MPs say the policy must be part of any coalition agreement after September’s elections
Austria’s centre-right People’s party has said it will insist on the banning of the far-right Identitarian Movement as a condition of any coalition after parliamentary elections next month.
Such a ban “must be in the next coalition agreement,” the People’s party (OeVP) parliamentary group leader August Woeginger said in a statement released to Austrian media.
Continue reading...On 19 August 1989, Hungarians and Austrians gathered in friendship at the border, paving the way to unification
When the end finally came for the Iron Curtain, it was not bulldozers or hammers that struck one of the first decisive blows, but a picnic.
Thirty years ago this Monday, on 19 August 1989, thousands of Hungarians and Austrians gathered at the border fence between the two countries, which also marked the dividing line between the Communist bloc and the west. They had come for a “pan-European picnic” of solidarity and friendship across the Iron Curtain, as momentum for political change increased and the Eastern bloc regimes struggled to keep up with rising popular discontent.
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