Via Jerusalem Post:
Far-right parties in some European countries are winning over Jewish voters by exploiting fears about militant Islamists and mainstream parties must do much more to address Europeans' security concerns, a Jewish leader said on Tuesday.
Boosted by Europe's migrant crisis, Norbert Hofer of Austria's anti-immigration Freedom Party only narrowly lost the country's presidential election on May 22. He would have been the first far-right head of state in the European Union.
"I understand that, most probably, a not insignificant part of the (Jewish) community here voted for Hofer for the presidency," the head of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), Pinchas Goldschmidt, told Reuters in an interview.
Goldschmidt, who is also the chief rabbi of Moscow, said he had received reports of a similar shift among French Jews towards supporting the anti-immigration National Front ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections next year in France.read more
"When God gave out intelligence, not everybody stood in line. And so when those parties come with a populist message to the Jews and say 'We're going to save you from the Muslims' ... propaganda is effective," he added.
(...)
"I think that since the populist right-wing parties raised real concerns of people, unless the mainstream parties of Europe are going to address those issues, they're going to lose."
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