Rising Star of Austrian Nationalism

Joerg Haider, the telegenic rising star of Austrian right-wing politics, was touring Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center when he spotted his own picture on the wall--alongside the likes of Idi Amin and David Duke.

He was outraged.

Haider called on a fellow Austrian, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to use his influence to get the picture removed, but to no avail. The photograph remained, and Haider lost this skirmish in his battle to change his image abroad as he climbs to power at home.

Best known for pro-Nazi statements that he now says were misconstrued and exaggerated, the populist Haider has in just a few years taken his far-right Austrian Freedom Party from extremist obscurity to second place in opinion polls--rivaling the two mainstream parties that have dominated Austrian politics since World War II. And he is setting his sights on becoming the next chancellor of this Alpine nation.

Haider is Europe’s most successful far-right politician. His party is the largest such group on the Continent. It holds 42 seats in the 183-member National Council, nearly four times the number the party held when Haider assumed control in 1986.

The key to his success, analysts say, is his charismatic ability to exploit the region’s hot-button issues at a time of widespread economic uncertainty. He rails against the government’s traditional patronage system and challenges the status quo politics of the ruling elite.

“Step by step, we are increasing our support,” Haider, 47, said in an interview at one of his offices, behind the ornate neoclassical parliament building. “People are a little bit afraid of the future. They do not believe the promises of their government.”

His political message is staunchly nationalistic and anti-establishment. It questions Austria’s membership in the European Union and favors the reversal of Austria’s historically liberal immigration policies. Human rights advocates blame his politics for stirring a new wave of racist xenophobia.

Judging from his party rhetoric, Haider admires the U.S. anti-immigrant backlash that started in California. A huge California state flag (he says the bear reminds him of his home district, Baerental, or Bear Valley) and pictures of himself posing with American immigration agents on the U.S.-Mexico border adorn his Vienna office.

If the United States and Mexico, two large democratic countries, are forced to erect fences to prevent illegal immigration, he argued, then surely Austria is justified in taking precautions to limit new arrivals.

Haider, like many Austrians the son of Nazi party members, first attracted international attention when he praised the forced-labor policies of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The Nazis, he said in 1991, “had a sound employment policy in the Third Reich.” That caused him to lose his job as governor of Carinthia province. In 1995, he lauded a group of former SS officers as “decent people.” And in a speech to fellow parliament members that same year, he referred to Auschwitz as a straflager, or “punishment camp”--a mild label, many people thought, for the Nazi facility that put millions of Jews to death.

A Gallup Poll conducted in 1995 for the New York-based American Jewish Council found that 17% of Haider’s supporters believed it possible that Nazi extermination camps never existed.

Nazi Ghosts

Austria is particularly sensitive to Nazi ghosts, given its history of collaboration with the Third Reich. Austrians are only slowly coming to terms with that past and were embarrassed when their president in the 1980s, Kurt Waldheim, was exposed as a former SS officer who served in a Balkan region where atrocities were committed.

When Haider’s party took nearly 28% of the vote in national elections for the European Parliament last year, many people were alarmed. Newspapers in Europe compared the showing to the 1932 performance of the Nazi Party shortly before Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

But Haider is not another Hitler. Although the Austrian Freedom Party was founded by former Nazis and for years espoused a brand of Pan-Germanic nationalism, much of its support today is not pro-Nazi but anti-government, with foreigners made the scapegoats for economic woes and rising crime.

And several Austrian analysts believe that it is still unlikely that Haider could become chancellor in elections scheduled for 1999 without support from other large political parties that, for now, consider him anathema.

The greater danger, analysts say, is his ability to drive the national agenda, polarize the population and push domestic politics to the right and inward. “I am your patron saint against further immigration,” Haider told supporters during campaign appearances. He has urged foreigners to go home, and earlier this year he supported rules denying public building contracts to firms that employed foreigners.

“Haider does not create racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism--he exploits them,” said Anton Pelinka, director of Vienna’s Institute for Conflict Research. “Haider is the negative man of Austrian politics. He has a strong minority for him and a stable majority against him. No one is neutral regarding Haider.”

To broaden his appeal, Haider has embarked on a concerted campaign to moderate his message, at least publicly, and repair his image.

He makes frequent trips to the United States, where he studiously picks up on the newest buzzwords and slogans. He proposed a “contract for Austria,” mimicking the successful 1994 Republican campaign, and offering a “bridge to the next century,” which borrowed from President Clinton’s reelection message. He attended a six-week Harvard University economics seminar, proudly displaying the diploma on an office wall. He even put a Jewish writer on the Freedom Party ticket in last year’s election.

The first thing his press aide shows a visiting reporter is a set of pictures of Haider attending a Martin Luther King Jr. awards ceremony sponsored by the Congress on Racial Equality in New York in January. Haider is shown shaking hands with Roy Innes, CORE president and black civil rights activist.

(A spokeswoman for CORE in New York, contacted by telephone, confirmed that Haider was an invited guest. The spokeswoman, Linda Tomlinson, initially seemed flustered when his politics were described, but she recovered quickly: “He struck us as a conservative gentleman,” she said. “We welcome opposing views.”)

Haider blames his enemies who, unable to stop him at the ballot box, use public opinion in other countries to taint him as a neo-Nazi.

For example, he says, there’s that photo hanging in the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Haider recalls visiting the center two years ago and asking his tour guide who the picture on the wall was, just to see what the guide would say.

“Oh, that’s a right-wing politician from Austria,” the guide told Haider. “He’s very dangerous.”

“Nobody can believe that I should be on the same level as Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein,” Haider said.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal center, remembers the call Schwarzenegger made on Haider’s behalf. Center officials explained to the actor the reasons Haider was included on the Museum of Tolerance’s Demagogue Wall.

“My understanding is he [Schwarzenegger] went back to Haider and said, ‘You’re on the wall because you deserve to be there,’ ” Cooper said by telephone from Los Angeles.

“Haider has made numerous trips to the U.S. to promote himself as an Austrian Newt Gingrich, a middle-of-the-road, charismatic, next-generation conservative. [But] he is a demagogue,” Cooper said.

Exuding Image

Everything about Haider exudes image. Aides give visitors a glossy, 133-page hardcover book, “Joerg in Pictures,” with 345 color photos of Haider from childhood to adulthood; Haider on the campaign trail; Haider bungee-jumping, frolicking on the ski slopes, meeting with world leaders and kissing babies. He is perpetually tanned, with a boyishly handsome face that photographs well. He is always exquisitely groomed.

“He is entertaining,” Pelinka said. “He can change his behavior like his clothes. He can speak at noon in volkstrachten [native costume], and then in the evening in a tux and then hit the discos, and everyone thinks they’re seeing a different person. He is very flexible in his behavior and appearance. He’s a kind of actor.”

A lawyer by profession who was schooled at the University of Vienna, Haider also is independently wealthy, thanks to the inheritance of a bountiful forest. According to Pelinka, Haider’s benefactor, a close family friend, purchased the property well below market price in the 1930s from a Jewish owner during the so-called Aryanization period, when Jews had to hurriedly sell their belongings before fleeing ahead of Hitler’s takeover in 1938.

Haider’s wife and two children live on the family’s country estate while he spends the weekdays living in Vienna.

Haider maintains that he and his ideas are driving the public debate, and that other politicians may scorn him one year, then steal his proposals the next. Some Austrians worry that he may be right.

“Gradually, ruling politicians are fulfilling what Haider is saying and even sometimes before he says it,” said Nikolaus Kumrath, general secretary of SOS Mitmensch, a Vienna-based immigrant advocacy group. “Everybody is looking like a rabbit to the snake. It is as though they fear his opinion and feel they have to enact it before he can.”

Isolation Backfired

Franz Vranitzky, the Social Democrat who resigned as chancellor in January after more than 10 years in office, was highly critical of Haider and vowed to keep him out of government. Vranitzky’s successor, Viktor Klima, and others are less absolute, saying that the policy of isolating Haider backfired and enhanced the Freedom Party leader’s standing among disaffected voters.

Haider’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was partially responsible for pushing through legislation this year that greatly limits immigration to Austria, a traditional haven for people fleeing Eastern Europe and, more recently, the war-torn Balkans.

His politics of isolationism have particular resonance now. Like much of Europe, demographics and potential economic turmoil are sending the tranquil country into a period of anxiety.

At first glance, Austria appears affluent, its economy healthy. Unemployment, about 4%, is low, though joblessness is higher in some working-class sectors.

Of even greater consequence, the government has let it be known that it can no longer afford to pay generous public benefits, including large pensions in a country where the average retirement age is 56. So the employed are beginning to retire later, which in turn means fewer jobs are being freed up.

Many Austrians feel that the rewards they expected when the country joined the European Union two years ago have not materialized. Yet they are being asked to weather austerity measures, watch as government spending is trimmed and make other sacrifices necessary to become competitive in a global economy.

Haider was able to capitalize on this discontent.

Critics say the kind of emotion stirred by Haider has fueled a wave of anti-foreigner violence, including a rash of bombings that killed four Gypsies in 1995. Skinheads then trampled a vigil for the dead.

Haider takes the criticism in stride.

“I accept [criticism] as a challenge,” he said. “If I said two years ago [that I would become chancellor], everyone would laugh. But today, it’s a serious discussion.”