Heinz Fassmann, vice-rector of the University of Vienna and a German national, has been appointed minister of science and education in the new Austrian coalition government of centre-right and far-right parties.
The 62-year-old Fassmann was sworn in on 18 December after being nominated as a non-party member by the centre-right People’s Party (ÖVP), led by new chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Concerns have been raised about the ÖVP having entered into a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), with news outlets including the BBC reporting that thousands of protestors took to the streets of Vienna.
Fassmann has worked as a professor of applied geography at the University of Vienna since 2000, and was at the Technical University of Munich before that. He has been chairman of the advisory council on migration in Austria’s foreign ministry, which is how he became known to Kurz, the newspaper Kurier reported on 16 December. He has also been awarded the Bruno Kreisky political book prize as co-author of “Demarcation, exclusion, recording: empirical findings on xenophobia and integration”.
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