An official of the conservative Austrian Peoples Party, which scored a major victory in the country’s national elections yesterday, said today that his party had nothing to do with pamphlets showing “anti-Semitic tendencies” distributed during the election campaign. The Peoples Party has won a narrow parliamentary majority as a result of the elections.
Hermann Withalm, the party’s general secretary, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he sharply condemned anti-Semitism. He made his statement in commenting on leaflets attributed to the Peoples Party which contained anti-Semitic remarks. He said that any such material had been “smuggled” into the party propaganda by “unknown adversaries” of the party.
Charges of anti-Semitism had also been made during the election campaign against the new Democratic Progressive Party. However, this faction received only 140,541 votes among the 4, 800, 000 ballots cast in the elections.
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