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A Difficult Legacy

What Next for Post-Haider Austria?

By Marion Kraske and Christian Neef

Few in Austria have been willing to speak ill of the recently deceased, right-wing populist Jörg Haider. But he leaves behind a difficult legacy. And it's one that the country's political class will have to come to terms with.

Eighteen years ago, in July 1990, 30,000 people came to the central cemetery in Vienna to attend the country's biggest state funeral ever. The ceremony was for Bruno Kreisky, who had served the country for two decades both as a cabinet minister and as chancellor. He was a welcome guest in diplomatic circles around the world, a talented political bridge-builder and one of the fathers of European social democracy.

On Saturday, Austria once again bore witness to an enormous funeral for a well known politician. This time though, it was for an entirely different type of public servant. The service was for Jörg Haider, the infamous right-wing populist.

Haider was the governor of the small state of Carinthia for 12 years, presiding over the state from his offices in Klagenfurt, a modest-sized city in southern Austria. He was head of the awkwardly-named party Alliance for the Future of Austria. And like Kreisky, he was a political talent -- but one that polarized instead of building bridges. In addition to aggressively flirting with Austria's right wing, he was a performer and a loner -- and a man with a self-destructive side. On Saturday just over a week ago, Haider's life ended when he smashed his car into a cement post at 142 kilometers per hour (88 mph) with a blood alcohol level that was three times the legal limit. He had just come from Stadtkrämer, Klagenfurt's hottest gay bar.

Baroque Pomp

And yet, despite the vast differences between the two politicians, Haider's funeral was hardly less dramatic than Kreisky's. On Saturday, 30,000 people turned out in Klagenfurt, a city of less than 100,000 people, to attend the ceremony. They included Austrian President Heinz Fischer, Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, Archbishop Edmont Farhat and Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of the Libyan president. Billionaire widow Ingrid Flick was there, as were representatives of Italy's extremist right-wing Northern League. Even the Dalai Lama sent a representative. To ensure that the people could bid farewell to Haider, an Austrian league football match between Austria Carinthia and Rapid Vienna was cancelled.

Austrian television prepared a one-and-a-half-hour, nationwide live broadcast, and the events of the entire day were broadcast on the Internet: the funeral procession beginning at the Landhaushof Hotel, the public farewell ceremony at Neuer Platz Square and the requiem in Klagenfurt Cathedral. Only Haider's burial in his hometown of Bärental was closed to everyone but his immediate family.

Vienna's Standard newspaper described the event as a state funeral "with baroque pomp."

"We stand, in shock, before the death of a man who moved Austria," Toni Faber, the priest at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, said on the Wednesday before the funeral. When bidding farewell, Faber added, one should consider the good sides of the deceased.

Since the demise of their governor, Carinthians have fervently taken Faber's advice. They decorated the site of the accident near Loibl Pass, where Haider's black sedan came to rest after flipping over several times, with candles and messages. Thousands came to pay their respects at the Landhaus in Klagenfurt, the seat of the Carinthian state parliament, where the body lay in state. Nary a critical word was said by any of the multitude of speakers who took to the microphones on Saturday.

Nothing But Good Things

"The sun has fallen from the sky in Carinthia," said the deputy governor, commenting on the loss of his political ally. His office instructed schools to hold an hour of mourning, even though Haider, who also served as president of the state's school board, did not exactly set a good example by driving while intoxicated.

The "iconization and deification" of the deceased, as the liberal Standard complained, began immediately after the accident, and not just in Carinthia but nationwide. Both the tabloids and television did their part, the paper said. According to writer Robert Menasse, saying nothing but good things about a dead man has a long tradition in Austria, and is a process in which the real person is replaced by a legend "that makes it possible to forget about his real actions."

But what exactly were those actions, in the case of Jörg Haider? He played down the evils of Nazism and used anti-Semitic language, he ignored the law as governor when he had bilingual street signs designed for the Slovenian minority removed and, recently, had a "special camp" for criminal asylum seekers built on Mount Saualpe, a 1,200-meter (3,936-foot) peak. But there was little talk of the Carinthian native's anti-democratic caprices in Austria last week.

"Jörg Haider was a fascist," says Menasse. He goes on, he was an Austro-fascist, who replaced annihilation with social marginalization, blood and soil with "homeland" and racism with rabid patriotism. And he sold all of this with the enthusiasm of a 1960s radical student leader.

Haider was also part of one of the biggest foreign policy scandals in post-World War II Austria. The inclusion of his right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), which he headed at the time, in the coalition government of then Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel in 2000 prompted the European Union to impose punitive measures on Austria.

A Turning Point in Austria's Political Landscape

The Carinthian later disappeared from the political stage -- until the most recent national parliamentary election. He celebrated a comeback with his Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), which he founded in 2005, managing to almost triple its seats in the parliament. Now, his death marks a turning point in Austria's political landscape.

The man who hopes to fill Haider's shoes in the future must now step out of the shadow of this charismatic figure. His name is Stefan Petzner, he is 27 and he dropped out of journalism school to work for Haider. Petzner was a member of Haider's so-called Buberlpartie, a group of young Austrian politicians who formed his inner circle during his rise to political prominence: men with tight-fitting suits, always tanned and loyal to the point of self-sacrifice. After the accident, Petzner was visibly distressed and repeatedly had to choke back tears in public.

Petzner was sitting in an expensive restaurant in Vienna's First District at midnight recently. Haider's death, he said quietly, was a great loss for him. "He was my best friend and I was his best friend."

Is he frightened of the overwhelming tasks he now faces? "I believe in my inner strength and that of the BZÖ," said Petzner. He said he wanted to retain his critical position on the European Union, and when it comes to immigration policy, the party will continue to pursue "a strict line." The Islamicization of Europe, said Petzner, must be prevented.

Of course, without Haider observers see little chance of survival for his party outside Carinthia. The BZÖ is a "party dominated by its leader," says Anton Pelinka, one of Austria's leading political scientists. Without Haider, he adds, little remains of the party but the man's myth.

This could be a golden opportunity for Heinz-Christian Strache, the current leader of the FPÖ. Strache, a more vulgar version of Haider, now plans to position himself as the only leading figure in the Austrian nationalist camp. Last week Strache announced that BZÖ members of parliament would be more than welcome to join the FPÖ. The two parties captured a combined 29 percent of the vote in the recent election, which puts them just below the Social Democrats (SPÖ), which won the largest share of votes in the election. However, Haider's death has increased the likelihood that Social Democrats and Christian Democrats will attempt to revive their old coalition. An alliance with the right wing is out of the question, says Werner Faymann, the head of the SPÖ, who has been charged with forming a new government. The Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) has also said it would be available for a coalition with the Social Democrats -- a repeat of the Grand Coalition that just fell apart paving the way for the vote held in late September.

Patriotic Populism

But many in the ÖVP also see a coalition with the FPÖ and the BZÖ as an option. Should the major Austrian parties be unable to come to an agreement, then the right wing will be there waiting for a shot at power. Petzner, the new head of the BZÖ, says that he will do whatever he can to patch together a ruling coalition. One of Haider's primary political aims was that of breaking up the Grand Coalition and Petzner says he would like to carry on that legacy.

There is, however, another Haider legacy. Just what that is has become the subject of intense debate in Austria. Indeed, the debate has become so heated that a number of Web sites have taken the step of limiting access to their reader forums for reasons of decorum.

Many of the things that Haider vehemently criticized were in fact worthy of criticism, says Robert Menasse, including the decades-long backroom wheeling and dealing of the major parties, trade unions and business groups. For Haider's political adversaries, it had become a matter of course to reject anything he said, even it was reasonable, says Menasse.

Haider was popular because he criticized the things that many criticized, and his rivals lost support for defending precisely these deficiencies. His success -- and the country's failure in confronting what he stood for -- created a political climate in Austria in which, despite the country's many parties, only patriotic populism exists, says Menasse.

That, the writer adds, will be the next government's biggest problem. "Haider is dead," Menasse writes, "and all of us have to live with him."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan