Austrian Politics Threatening the Private Sector

In a country that depends on tourism more than any other in the industrialized world, scenes of Austrian police clashing with anti-rightist rioters in clouds of tear gas are more worrying than mostly symbolic diplomatic isolation.

And early Saturday, police fired tear gas and water cannons to put down a melee by about 200 people pelting them with stones and bottles near central Vienna’s historic Stephansplatz, a favorite stop for the millions of tourists who visit this capital city each year.

The clashes left 43 police officers, 11 demonstrators and two bystanders injured, police reported. Ten people were arrested and later released.

Then, Saturday night, several thousand demonstrators marched again through the city center to protest the entry of Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party into a national coalition government.

This time, scores of riot police, and a police helicopter circling overhead, averted a repeat of the violence that erupted after midnight Friday.

But the damage to Austria’s reputation as a virtually crime-free vacation spot may be harder to control if, as expected, the confrontation over the far right’s rise to power continues for weeks and the protests grow larger.

“Economically, this isolation is a horror,” Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof, a commentator with Austria’s Profil magazine, said in an interview Thursday. “In the short term, it damages tourism, which is a very important factor for Austrian industry.” He added, “In the medium term we don’t know, but investors abroad may feel it isn’t worth investing in Austria if there is an unstable political situation.”

About 500,000 people, or 14% of the country’s work force, are employed either directly or indirectly in the tourism industry, the country’s national tourism agency reported last year.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that tourists spend in Austria account for 6% of the country’s gross national product.

Austria’s economic dependence on tourism is the greatest in the 29-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes the United States, the tourist board added.

“Tourism accounts for a higher proportion of Austria’s overall economic performance than in any other industrialized nation,” it said.

About 52% of Austrians polled Thursday said they didn’t believe that the country’s tourism industry will suffer because of the current political crisis, while 40% said they thought it will. The polling figures roughly reflected the bitter divide in Austria concerning the far right’s new role in national government.

Although shoppers thronged Saturday to Vienna’s popular Kartner Strasse shopping district, where there was little evidence of the violence just hours earlier, there are already signs that cancellations are hitting Austria’s tourism industry.

In Belgium, whose government has been among the loudest demanding strong sanctions against the Vienna government, schools have canceled students’ annual ski trips to Austria’s Alpine resorts.

In addition, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel canceled a planned visit in May to commemorate the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where Adolf Hitler’s Nazis killed about 100,000 people, most of them Jews.

Haider, who is governor of Austria’s southern Carinthia province, has made comments over the years minimizing Nazi war crimes.

He has apologized for the remarks, but others that he has made attacking immigrants have left his critics convinced that he is a racist demagogue with a loose tongue who tries to manage his image in hopes of becoming chancellor one day.

Although Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel’s conservative People’s Party will dominate the coalition federal Cabinet, his deputy comes from Haider’s Freedom Party, as do the ministers of defense, finance, justice, infrastructure and social affairs.

In response, the U.S. has temporarily recalled its ambassador to Austria, and European governments have downgraded diplomatic ties with Vienna.

But Schuessel has called the European Union’s reaction “very exaggerated.”

“Lots of people in Austria are asking themselves whether the EU is being fair in pushing a tiny country with only 8 million inhabitants into a corner like this,” the chancellor said in an interview published today in the newspaper Die Welt.

Calling Austria “one of the safest and most democratic countries in Europe and in the world,” the chancellor asked for 100 days to prove the coalition a good government.

Commentator Hoffmann-Ostenhof blamed Austria’s political and economic elite for the crisis, arguing that powerful businesspeople didn’t try to stop Haider’s disastrous rise because they were more interested in punishing former Chancellor Viktor Klima’s left-wing Social Democrats.

“There was not one industrialist, not one single organization of industry, that said: ‘Are you crazy? You are just ruining our economy,’ ” Hoffmann-Ostenhof said. “That means you have the political elite, who didn’t vote for Haider, but who accept the [coalition] government.

“The only reason for that is they hate, viscerally, the Social Democrats. They feel so humiliated after these 30 years of socialist government that they think: ‘Now it’s enough. We have our revenge.’ ”