Austria wants a constitutional ban on political Islam and cannot say where the votes are

Stocker told the public broadcaster ORF on 31 August that his government wanted greater control over radicalisation carried out in the name of Islam, and within days told the Vienna newspaper Heute that it plans to introduce a constitutional law banning political Islam. “If religion is used politically, we must oppose it with all severity,” he said in one English rendering of the Heute remark; Brussels Signal rendered the same line as “When religion is used politically, we must confront it with all severity.” He has also said publicly that “it cannot be allowed to happen in this country that a preacher dictates things rather than Parliament.” Pressed by Brussels Signal on how he would assemble the two-thirds majority in the Nationalrat that a constitutional law needs, the chancellor said he did not know. No bill text has been published. Every outlet this desk reached on the file is either right-of-centre partisan or non-Austrian; no German-language or Austrian government primary source was obtained.

The definitional problem travels. In March a majority of the Dutch House of Representatives backed a motion calling for a ban on the Brotherhood and affiliated organisations — reported as 76 of 150 members, a figure that rests on a tertiary source and which this desk has not checked against the Tweede Kamer voting record. Parties including the CDA objected that a ban would be legally difficult because the Brotherhood is not a formally structured organisation in the Netherlands. In Austria the target that does possess legal form is the IGGÖ, the Islamic religious body recognised under the Islamgesetz, reported on 8 September to be facing unspecified “action” — proscribing a recognised domestic religious corporation is a materially different act from banning a foreign network. The week’s only other dated item was an 18 September media release from Family First, an Australian minor party, whose national director Lyle Shelton urged Canberra to ban the movement, endorsing a proposal by the British Conservative peer and historian Andrew Roberts. Two aggregators carried near-identical text; no wire service or Australian broadcaster followed.

Assessment: Read the arithmetic, not the announcement. A chancellor who cannot name his two-thirds majority has made a statement of intent, and statements of intent are cheap in a coalition. The thread worth tracking is not whether Europe disapproves of the Brotherhood — that is settled — but what any of these governments would actually serve papers on. The CDA’s objection is the operative one everywhere: proscription law needs a defendant with a legal form. Which is why the measures that do land tend to land on things that are registered — a recognised religious corporation, a licensed party, a bank account — rather than on a transnational current of political thought.