In 1968 Selma Steinmetz resigned her Communist Party membership as a protest over the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia which was the Kremlin's response to cautious political liberalisation under First Party Secretary Alexander Dubček. She was also unhappy with what many saw as the Austrian Party's excessively cautious response to those events. Instead she joined the and found in it a new ideological home. Subsequently she also worked with Amnesty International. She remained a lifelong antifascist, setting herself against racism and antisemitism.