FPÖ event costs public €50,000 for police security

The public sector spent around €50,000 securing an FPÖ event in Innsbruck, according to ORF Tirol, while the cost of a separate security operation for a meeting of German-speaking presidents remains unknown.

Some 130 police officers, including dog-handling units, were deployed around the Congress conference centre on September 12, where about 1,000 people attended the FPÖ ceremony honouring the party’s former leader Jörg Haider. Dozens of police vehicles were stationed around the venue, and officers also secured a protest by about 100 critics at Annasäule.

Austria has no legal basis requiring political parties to pay police costs for their events. Security in the public space around the Congress was therefore considered a state responsibility, with the full cost covered by public funds rather than the FPÖ.

The figures were released more quickly than those for the September 1 meeting in Innsbruck attended by President Alexander Van der Bellen and other heads of state from five German-speaking countries. That event required helicopters, drones, the Cobra special unit and a large police deployment. The Interior Ministry said it could take weeks to calculate the cost because so many different units were involved.

The FPÖ has recently criticised the cost of security operations at other political events. Police protection for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s most recent visit to Vienna cost about €360,000. After that visit, FPÖ Secretary General Christian Hafenecker said hundreds of thousands of euros had been spent on an event with no added value for Austria while people were struggling with record inflation.

Asked by ORF Tirol what added value he saw in the Innsbruck event honouring Haider, Hafenecker had not responded by email at the time of publication.

The FPÖ later responded in a five-minute video message on Herbert Kickl’s Facebook channel. The party said it had no influence over the scale of the police operation and described the €50,000 cost as regrettable. It attributed most of the expense to announced protests by what it called “left-wing extremist groups”. The FPÖ said the event’s main value was the gathering of its parliamentary group.

The party had also criticised the deployment of large numbers of police officers for Zelenskyy’s visit, arguing they were urgently needed to protect the public. The Innsbruck FPÖ event itself required about 130 officers.