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Jörg Haider, an Austrian populist, died on October 11th, aged 58!
The Economist, London
Oct. 16th, 2008



IF YOU wanted to see a Liebling in Jörg Haider, it wasn’t difficult. The tanned, cold, Aryan good looks, the liking for black leather, the taste for extreme sports and fast cars, all hinted at it. So did the youthful membership of pan-Germanic mock- duelling clubs, the black-cross flags, the foggy Remembrance Day trysts with SS officers and the band of crop-haired followers who were liable to break out in a chorus of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”. His father had been an illegal Liebling long before the Anschluss, and his mother a local leader of the League of German Maidens; their de-Nazification after the war, with Robert made to dig graves and Dorothea banned from teaching, struck their son (though he did not remember it) as brutal injustice.

Then there were the remarks, few enough, but indicators of a certain current of thought. Dolfi’s employment policies had been “orderly”, he said, unlike the modern Austrian government’s; words that forced him to step down briefly in 1991 from the governorship of Carinthia. The SS veterans he mixed with were men of “character”, “honour” and “conviction”. The phrase Überfremdung, foreigner overrun, which crept into his immigration-talk, had not been heard since Liebling days. And though he once picked a Jew as his deputy at the top of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), he could not help wondering aloud how the head of the Jewish community, Ariel Muzicant, apparently named after a soap powder, could have such dirty hands.

The rest of Europe certainly took him at those words, and when the FPÖ notched up its best electoral result in 1999, 27% of the vote and a place in the governing coalition, EU sanctions were placed on Austria. Many Austrians were ashamed of Mr Haider; but others were aware that he articulated their country’s confusion about the past, a mixture of defiance and repentance, victimhood and guilt, and the struggle to expel old ghosts. Mr Haider, too, talked of “drawing a line” under Nazism and declared that he wanted keine braunen Schatten, no brown shadows. The outside world found such mumblings unconvincing. Mr Haider retorted that this was not the world’s business.

The Haider show at home (and it was always a show of sound, speed, lights and glamour) had a different feel. There he was the Carinthian boy-wonder, waltzing round his adopted deep-south base in a bone-buttoned loden jacket, wolfing Strudel and Nudel washed down with Jörg Bear beer and handing out 5,000 ski passes for the Gerlitzen to mark his 50th birthday. He lorded it like a local count on €10m-worth of forested slopes in Bärental, bought for a song by an uncle in 1941 from a Jew fleeing for Italy. As Carinthia’s governor for the past decade (in a border province that had been successively invaded by Mongols, Turks and Slavs), Mr Haider played the Austrian patriot, defying the law to ship criminal immigrants from eastern Europe across to Styria on the night bus, uprooting Slovene road signs and plastering towns with posters promising a clean sweep of filthy foreign beggars.

The eternal chancer
All this hard-right politicking gave the jitters to some. But Mr Haider, sly as a snake and sharp as a razor, was not so easily defined. When Austria’s ruling parties opposed Turkish membership of the EU, he supported it. Austria’s own accession he first endorsed, then passionately resisted (leading the “No” forces in the 1994 referendum), then accepted. When Saddam Hussein was a pariah, he went to Baghdad to shake his hand. His most admired politician was Archduke Johann, a modernising 19th-century governor of Styria, closely followed by Newt Gingrich and Tony Blair. His ideology shifted with whatever group he was talking to, conservative one moment and leftish the next, as various as the suits, jeans, Robin Hood outfits, puffer ski-jackets and medieval robes in which he clad himself. It was often said that the only “ism” he ever embraced was populism.

This made him, for all his toxicity, a tantalising oddity in Austrian politics. In a country corruptly dominated since the war by “black” (conservative) and “red” (socialist) parties, allocating by the entrenched Proporz system all seats and posts of any consequence, the blue-flagged FPÖ offered an eruption of difference. Many objected when Mr Haider, after his putsch in 1986, gave such a hard-right shove to a party briefly attempting to be liberal. But he thought of it as a vehicle for saying the unsayable, testing the new and generally raising Cain. Behaving this way was a freiheitliche, a truly liberal, thing to do.

When Mr Haider died, smashed in his black car on the road to Klagenfurt, he had just reassumed leadership of the Alliance for Austria’s Future, the party he formed in 2005 after splitting from the FPÖ. (There had been many rows, flouncing-outs, reconciliations; this one was unmendable.) His new party had gained 11% of the vote in September’s elections; he was on the up again in national politics, though never, it was clear, as far as a post in government.

His death itself was the last dramatic Haider show, speeding drunk along a road where he had narrowly escaped death before, crashing into a concrete pole, flipping over time after time. Once more, he played the chancer. Some supporters also thought he was escaping agents of Mossad.

http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12415006


Kommentar!

Die Englaender koennen es immer noch nicht verwinden, dass sie ihren Kampf gegen die Na.zis mit dem schliesslichen successiven Verlust ihrer britischen Kolonien bezahlen mussten, und seitdem ihr successively auseinander fallendes 'britisches Weltreich zu einer successiven 'Mulatten-Kolonie' verkuemmert.

The New York Times:
"Mr. Haider’s controversial and charismatic populism transformed Austrian politics in recent decades and was instrumental in moving anti-immigrant politics from Europe’s fringes toward the mainstream. He helped to break the grip on government of centrist parties that he said had lost touch with the people."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/world/europe/16austria.html?ref=world

Tribune, London:
"While Mr Haider was not a neo-Liebling or neo-fascist in the traditional sense of the word, his admiration of aspects of the Third Reich, for instance its full employment policy, resulted in him being labelled as both of these by many politicians and commentators both inside and outside of the country."
http://www.tribunemagazine.co.uk/2008/10/16/now-far-right-in-austria-looks-to-the-future-without-haider/