Austrian Far Right OKs Coalition Deal

Ignoring threats of diplomatic isolation by Austria’s European Union partners, leaders of the country’s far right and of more mainstream conservatives announced a deal late Tuesday night to form a coalition government.

The agreement between Joerg Haider’s far-right Freedom Party and Wolfgang Schuessel’s conservative People’s Party still must win approval from Austrian President Thomas Klestil.

But with both Austria and the European Union now backed into corners over the participation of Haider’s party in national government, few here expect Klestil to reject the coalition and risk a backlash for caving in to foreign pressure.

The European Union has threatened to downgrade diplomatic links with Austria to “technical” contacts and to impose other diplomatic sanctions if Haider’s party participates in a national government.

But Austria’s 14 European Union partners are not united behind a strategy that some see as almost guaranteed to provoke more resentment in Austria and add to Haider’s support.

Haider has said he will continue as governor of Carinthia province. Opponents of the threat to isolate Austria argue that the EU shouldn’t be openly trying to influence the outcome of Austria’s Oct. 3 elections, in which Haider’s party placed second.

Austria’s politicians have been arguing ever since about how to form a stable government, and Haider’s poll ratings have climbed as public dissatisfaction with old-style politics has grown.

European leaders worried about the rise of the far right in their own countries decided only Monday to take the unusual step of threatening strong bilateral measures before Austria’s government is even formed because they are so determined to deny Haider any hint of international respectability.

Haider is seen by his many critics as a demagogue because he minimized the atrocities committed under Adolf Hitler, and Austria’s involvement in them, by praising the Third Reich’s “orderly employment policy.”

Speaking to a meeting of Austrian World War II veterans in October 1991, he said: “Our soldiers were not criminals. At most, they were victims.” In December 1995, he said the Waffen SS, Hitler’s elite combat force, “deserves all the honor and respect of the army in public life.”

Haider has since tried to explain away, or in some cases apologize for, those and other remarks. But he still speaks out against immigration and opposes any European Union expansion eastward into former Soviet bloc countries, playing on Austrian fears of a flood of cheap labor.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright added her voice Tuesday to the mounting pressure on Austria by telephoning Schuessel, who is the country’s foreign minister as well as the leader of the senior party in the proposed coalition.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean and founder of Los Angeles’ Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote to Klestil on Monday to express his hope that the president will find a way for Austria to form a government without members of Haider’s party.

Haider’s photograph hangs on the “Demagogue Wall” in the Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance, and Haider has twice gone to Los Angeles attempting to have the photo removed. But it will stay there until he changes his policies and tells the truth about Hitler’s Nazis, Hier wrote to Klestil.

But Nazi hunter Wiesenthal himself told Dutch television that Haider isn’t as dangerous as he’s made out to be.

“I see no danger in him. I think he is overestimated,” Wiesenthal told the NOS television channel. “What’s more, there’s no one behind him, no successor.

“Haider is a populist of the right, and populists of the right always speak out against foreigners,” he said.

State Department spokesman James B. Foley refused to provide details of Albright’s telephone conversation with Schuessel, but National Security Council spokesman David Leavy said Washington will consider steps similar to those threatened by the European Union.