Painful Waldheim Chapter Ending for Austria : Diplomacy: President-elect Thomas Klestil is expected to restore Vienna to the good graces of Western democracies.

Early next week, one of the most painful chapter’s of Austria’s postWorld War II history comes to a close: The Waldheim era is ending.

The Tuesday presidential inauguration of Thomas Klestil, a 59-year-old career diplomat and political unknown, effectively closes the books on the six-year term of his controversial predecessor, Kurt Waldheim.

Waldheim, former U.N. secretary general, was shunned by most Western democracies during his presidency because of his inability to clarify a questionable war record with the German Wehrmacht.

Initially at least, Klestil will be busy picking up the diplomatic debris left in Waldheim’s wake.

State visits to Austria’s European neighbors will resume for the first time since the mid-1980s; relations at the highest level are expected to normalize elsewhere, too. For example, Klestil predicted that Austria’s diplomatic presence in Israel, downgraded at Jerusalem’s request during the Waldheim years, would quickly reacquire full ambassadorial status.

“This will be corrected as soon as I take office,” the president-elect said in an interview in his office at the Austrian Foreign Ministry, where he is winding up his duties as the ministry’s senior civil servant and de facto deputy foreign minister.

Links between the Austrian presidency and the United States are also expected to quickly improve. As a highly popular consul general in Los Angeles in the 1970s and a respected ambassador in Washington through the early 1980s, Klestil received a warm “Dear Tom” congratulatory telegram from President Bush after his May 24 election victory.

He counts a stack of similar messages from the heads of other democracies, all expressing the hope for early meetings.

“I will be traveling a lot,” he said when asked about the consequences of following in Waldheim’s footsteps. “I will be meeting with all those heads of state from countries who are our friends. I think we need them and they need us--in all modesty.”

By tradition, his first official state visit--already set for October--will be to Austria’s neutral neighbor, Switzerland, although Klestil said he planned a series of brief working visits before then that will take him to Germany and probably Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Italy.

Klestil takes office at a crucial time in Austria’s postwar history, and, although the country’s presidency has traditionally been a largely ceremonial post, his impact--in a very different way--could be far more dramatic than that of his predecessor.

A no-nonsense senior diplomat, Klestil is clearly a product of Austria’s mainstream, but he is also a kind of maverick, an outsider with allegiance to none of Austria’s powerful, entrenched political constituencies. “Successful as a diplomat, a blank piece of paper as a politician and, as a person, blessed with an unmistakable talent for communication,” the German weekly, Die Zeit, summed him up in a recent article.

As a political outsider, he may one day be better known, not so much as Waldheim’s successor, but as the first to capitalize on the growing public disenchantment with political establishments that now grips so many Western democracies and in part explains the Ross Perot phenomenon in the present American presidential campaign.

“It helped greatly that he was an unknown,” said Peter Ulram, head of the political research department at Fessel & GFK, a leading Vienna-based polling organization. “He was not too close to the political parties; he had a message that was credible, and he was an effective television communicator. This was the first Austrian campaign won on TV.”

When he entered the presidential race last November, opinion surveys found that only about 1% of Austria’s voters had ever heard of him. His opponent, Transportation Minister Rudolf Streicher, was known to 80%.

Klestil won the nomination of the large Austrian People’s Party, to which Waldheim belongs, only after a bitter internal party debate. The choice was made apparently because party leaders, sensing the public mood, believed only a fresh face had a chance.

While Klestil capitalized on the exposure that goes with a major party nomination, he effectively distanced himself from the Establishment. His campaign slogan, “Power Needs Control,” struck a chord.

After finishing a close second in the first round of the two-step presidential election in April, he won the May 24 runoff against Streicher with 57%. “It’s not that people are fed up with the democratic state, they are fed up with the power of the parties and the party establishments,” Klestil said.

The son of a Viennese streetcar conductor, Klestil studied economics in college, then entered the diplomatic service. And in the course of a 65-minute interview, he gave no indication that he is ready to relax amid the pomp of official ceremony. Instead, he carries all the earmarks of a populist reformer about to shake out the system from the top down.

He talked of cutting into the monopoly of power enjoyed by the country’s main political parties, of expanding the presidency’s tiny staff (about 20 now) to include groups of experts to advise him on important, long-term issues and of his plan to use the media to challenge the political parties if he sees the need.

“I feel that since I’m the only one in this country directly elected by the people--and with an absolute majority--they have the right to hear from me about the long-term problems they are concerned with,” he said.

During his campaign, he did just that, speaking bluntly on issues considered by more seasoned politicians to be too controversial to be addressed in such terms or too hallowed to be questioned at all.

In foreign affairs, he not only came out strongly in favor of Austria’s application for European Community membership, but raised the prospect that EC membership could end Austria’s political neutrality--a position anchored in the national constitution and one that many here associate directly with the country’s affluence. For Austrians, it was neutrality that kept them out of the arms race, that made their country a lucrative conduit between East and West, and that brought Vienna thousands of jobs from United Nations and other international organizations.

“As important as neutrality was in the past, the world around us has dramatically changed,” he said. “If you want to follow effective policies, you have to adapt those policies. We’ll have to adapt to the practical realities of the EC.”

While commentators predicted that such a stance would boomerang, the public seemed to value the candor.

As a key player in the Austrian Foreign Ministry, Klestil said he worked hard for last year’s decision to permit allied aircraft and trains supporting the Persian Gulf War effort to pass through Austria. “I was at the forefront of that decision,” he said. “This is a step from neutrality to solidarity. Solidarity is my key word in international relations.”

During the interview, Klestil was reluctant to discuss the problems linked to the Waldheim era and clearly irritated at the idea that only branding Waldheim as an international pariah made Austrians face their past. Still, he admitted that during the past six years, “many people became more conscious” of that past.