Sunday elections likely to leave Hitler-admiring politician as local anomaly
The sun is shining on an alpine meadow. Girls in dirndls dispense frothing jugs of beer, the queue is lengthening for the sausage and dumplings. As the brass band of the Klagenfurt police pipes up, Jörg Haider is in his element.
The wisecracking, gladhanding governor of Austria's southern province of Carinthia works the crowd masterfully. Photographers jostle, the TV cameras roll. Another photo opportunity in an election campaign. "Things are looking good, very positive. I'm very optimistic," Mr Haider told the Guardian. "We're well on track to reach our goal."
Here in Klagenfurt, the capital of Carinthia close to the borders with Italy and Slovenia, they love the extreme rightwing populist who has spent the past two decades successfully battering Austria's political system, climbing to become the most formidable extreme-right leader in Europe.
Last year 42% of voters in Carinthia backed Mr Haider and made him governor of the province - a post that he had given up 15 years ago after voicing admiration for Adolf Hitler's "decent employment policies".
But Mr Haider's big problem now is that Carinthia is an anomaly. Austria has turned its back on the tub thumper who wanted to become Austrian chancellor, and despite his local popularity, he looks finished. In general elections this Sunday, his Movement for Austria's Future is unlikely to scale the 4% hurdle needed to win seats in the national parliament in Vienna. For the first time in years, the party led by Mr Haider could be absent from the Austrian parliament.
"He's approaching the end," said Anton Pelinka, an Austrian political scientist. "It's Haider's last act. He's on the defensive. He can survive a few years as a purely local politician in Carinthia, but as a factor nationally he's finished."
The telegenic, perma-tanned and perennially boyish 56-year-old naturally contests the bleak prognosis. "They're all trying to destroy me with their talk in the corridors of Vienna. They think I'll be buried on Sunday. But the corpses won't be here, they'll be in Vienna."
But all the opinion polls point to a showing of around 3% for Mr Haider's party on Sunday, a stunning reversal from the glory days of 1999 when this son of a Nazi stormtrooper led his party to second place in a national election with 27% of the vote and put his lieutenants in government in coalition with the Christian democrats of the chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel.
"He wanted to become chancellor once," said Harald Scheucher, the Christian Democrat mayor of Klagenfurt. "Now he has no chance."
It is 20 years ago this month that Mr Haider, at a congress in Innsbruck, shot to national and international prominence by seizing leadership of the Freedom party, a party rooted in unrepentant postwar, pan-German nationalism and Nazi sympathies. His party, he quipped, was not a descendant of the Nazi party: "If it was, it would have a majority in Austria."
Over the next 13 years, Mr Haider, Austria's youngest MP when he entered parliament in 1979, took a party languishing at under 5% and improved its performance in every national and regional election he contested; in 1999 it displaced the Christian democrats as the country's number-two political force.
He saluted Waffen SS veterans, campaigned against Austria's EU membership, railed against immigrants, attacked the cosy, corrupt political arrangements of postwar Austria. He collected the protest vote and became the model for the gathering forces of rightwing, anti-immigrant populism across Europe.
Mr Haider thrived as a mercurial maverick, the voice of the loser. But protest suited him better than power, analysts say. He found that responsibility was the enemy of populism.
Mr Pelinka said: "His great strategic error was to join government in 2000, because he forfeited the protest vote. Responsibility in government can't be reconciled with populism."
But Mr Haider seeks to put a brave face on his decline. "I withdrew from national politics in 2000, gave up the ambition to be chancellor, and decided to concentrate on Carinthia." Yet two years later he successfully plotted the downfall of the first Schüssel government and last year abandoned his Freedom party to form the Movement for Austria as his personal vehicle.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric continues. In the election campaign his party is calling for the immediate deportation of 300,000 foreigners, saying Austrians are "terrorised" by immigrant criminals. He is defying Austria's supreme court and the constitution by removing bilingual place names in areas of Carinthia that are home to a sizeable Slovene minority.
If the Haider era looks over, however, "Haiderism" in Austria is alive and kicking, the torch borne by a Vienna dentist, the Freedom party's new leader. With a campaign of Brussels bashing and Muslim baiting and an end to immigration, Heinz-Christian Strache is hoping to come third in the election with around 10%, after taking 15% in local elections in Vienna last year.
In his own words
1986 after Freedom party leadership coup
"The Freedom party is not the descendant of the Nazi party. If it were, we would have an absolute majority in Austria."
1986
"Do we really need 180,000 foreigners here when we've got 140,000 unemployed?"
1991, his unemployment benefit cuts are attacked in the Carinthian parliament as recalling Third Reich policies. He responds
"At least the Third Reich had a decent employment policy."
1995 as Austria agrees to pay compensation to victims of the Nazis
"It's not fair if all the tax coffers go to Israel."
1995, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, Austria's biggest Nazi concentration camp, he calls the camp a
"punishment centre".
1996 speech to a Waffen SS reunion
"In this world there are decent people who have character and who remained true to their convictions."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/austria/article/0,,1883706,00.htmlclautsch - 2. Okt, 16:48
