Austria has linked the riots that hit France and Italy on October 17 and 18 to immigration from outside Europe, joining a line of EU governments drawing the same connection.
Chancellor Christian Stocker said in a message posted on social media on October 19 that Europeans had to be honest about the consequences of the migration of recent years, arguing that attitudes and conflicts that were not European had been brought into Europe along with it.
He said the demonstrations had been appropriated by violent vandals and had given way to raw violence, looting and deliberate destruction. He condemned that brutality in the strongest terms and said nothing could justify it.
Anyone throwing stones at police officers, setting fires and looting shops did not want dialogue, Stocker said, but chaos and the retreat of the State.
Austria would not permit that, he added, saying freedom, equal rights for women and men and the rule of law were not negotiable, and that those who did not share Austrian values had no place in the country. Whoever threatened that way of life was an enemy of an open and pluralist society, he said.
French authorities have condemned the disorder that accompanied the nationwide protests of October 17, called over the state of public education, the cost of living and police violence in recent weeks.
At least 2,397 people were arrested and 997 police officers injured, according to the French Government. The town hall in Limoges, in central France, was set alight and gutted, and shops were looted in several cities.
The violence then crossed the Alps, with rioters looting shops and attacking police in Milan for a second night and further trouble reported in Rome and Turin.
Italian police said 271 people were taken to police stations on October 18, among them 220 minors and 60 foreign nationals. Of the 32 formally placed under arrest, 23 were minors and 13 were foreign citizens.
Stocker is not alone among EU leaders. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on October 19 that migration and a failure to integrate newcomers were the most likely causes of the unrest, while Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the lawbreaking in France was mainly the work of people with a migrant background.
In France, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has ordered localised curfews in urban areas and has kept a nationwide state of emergency on the table. The protests began in late September over school conditions and widened to other grievances before the rioting set in.
