Because the Ministry of the Interior is prominently threatening a lawsuit against PR consultant Rudolf Fußi on its own website and on Twitter, there is heavy criticism against Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (ÖVP).
A hardware error was the reason that the website of the Ministry of the Interior (BMI) was offline for around 30 hours, said ministry spokesman Patrick Maierhofer. After she could be reached again on Thursday morning, one immediately noticed a prominent message on the BMI homepage: “Ministry of the Interior is examining legal steps against Rudolf Fußi”, it was written, flanked by a portrait photo of the Interior Minister, Karl Nehammer (ÖVP). You could read about it on Twitter on the BMI account.
The background is a tweet from PR consultant and Puls4 presenter Rudolf Fußi, who compared police officers with dogs on February 13th. “They are probably also more intelligent than the average employee of @LPDWien,” he wrote on Twitter at the time, with Fußi referring to the Twitter account of the Vienna State Police Department.
Nehammer now finds the statement to be “unreasonable”, because: “So-called political activists who discredit the work of the police officers and also insult them, must not go uncommented,” says the article published on the BMI Website is read. A culture of “excessive and completely unreflected criticism has spread in social media, which can no longer be reconciled with the right to freedom of expression.” Such behavior is “just as dangerous for our democratic coexistence as the spread of conspiracy theories or extremist ones Views “.
PR consultant Fußi himself, who worked for ex-Federal Chancellor Christian Kern, among others, enjoyed the public debate on Twitter on Thursday. Criticism of the communication of the cause came from the green coalition partner. The MP Nina Tomaselli posted on Twitter that the threat of legal action was “without any substance”.
Neos MP and ex- “Kurier” editor-in-chief Helmut Brandstätter also commented. He asked Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg (ÖVP) “to explain to his colleague @karlnehammer that he would harm Austria internationally if he misused an official website as a pillory against critics.”
However, according to Thomas Höhne, a Viennese lawyer and expert on personal rights, Fußi has to reckon with consequences. “I would not rule that out,” said Höhne on in the “press”. According to criminal law, it is forbidden to insult an authority.
(juwe)
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