[szbalint]

This comes from a government in which the junior coalition partner is the far-right FPÖ, an openly pro-Putin and authoritarian party.

This law is part of their campaign to browbeat the press and public sphere into submission and it is following attempts to rein the austrian public broadcaster (orf) in.

The proposed law is useless for any legitimate purpose, as anonymity was never a problem with hate speech or other things. People are willing to engage in hate speech, libel or just in overall awful things with their name attached without reservation already.

[DyslexicAtheist]

Putin even attended the wedding of Austrian foreign minister last year[1] and nobody was outraged, in fact Austrians on social media applauded it. Vienna is also crawling with Russian spooks.

The problem in Austria is that the Russians have started buying a lot of property there decades ago. Property prices in Kitzbühel have been going through the roof thanks to Russian oligarchs buying up everything. Russians love Austria (as much as Cyprus) because it's a great place to hide and launder money, see[2]:

Peter Pilz, a member of parliament from the opposition Greens party, said the Italian mafia, especially the Calabria-based ‘Ndrangheta, had years ago used Austria as a money-laundering centre, cleansing around 2 billion euros.

“Now it is mainly a matter of Russian money. A lot of banks must be afraid that the Russians will take their millions and flee to Asia,” he said.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vladimir-putin-karin-kneissl-we...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-banksecrecy-austria-id...

see also: How Russia stands to profit from Austria’s new government: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/how-russia-stands-to-p...

edit: parent is getting silently downvoted for stating facts. welcome to HN.

[cxy1211]

I wonder why people think that Putin controls all right wing parties on this planet (including Trump).

No one talks about Gazprom Schroeder (center-left SPD) who destroyed the welfare state in Germany and then joined Gazprom.

[rocqua]

But what about this other thing?

[int_19h]

I don't think he controls them. What it reminds me of is how USSR supported pretty much any political movement anywhere in the world, so long as it was in opposition to the capitalist West. The important part was that last one, but most such movements were left-wing.

But that was there and then. We don't have any strong hard left movements of that kind in Western countries today. We do, however, have far right / "third position" movements of that kind. And ideologically, they align pretty well with Russia's own internal politics, so they're more reliable allies, as well. So, while there is some support for left-wing anti-establishment movements, most of it goes to the right. And hence we're mostly talking about that.