AUSTRIA:Austria's forthcoming election sees two rivals vying for the one-quarter of right-leaning voters, writes Derek Scally
NO MATTER where you go in Vienna these days, Jörg Haider is watching you.
Whether you are at the Hofburg palace, from where the Habsburgs once ruled central Europe, or in the Esperantopark, where Harry Lime vanished in The Third Man, the perma-tanned Haider is present.
From hundreds of election posters around the city, his piercing eyes appeal to voters to break 18 months of grand coalition stasis and vote back into power the world's most famous Austrian politician after Arnold Schwarzenegger.
It's nine years since Haider led the Freedom Party (FPÖ) to stunning election success with anti-immigrant populist rhetoric - and occasional praise for Hitler.
The party's coalition with the conservative People's Party (ÖVP) led horrified EU neighbours to freeze diplomatic relations with Vienna.
By the time the thaw set in several months later, with residual ill-will on both sides, the FPÖ was paralysed by infighting.
Haider eventually gave up the party leadership and returned home to his job as governor of the state of Carinthia.
An FPÖ split followed in 2005, and Haider and his loyalists left to form the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ).
After only just clearing the 4 per cent parliamentary hurdle last time around, Haider has returned from Carinthia to head the BZÖ general election campaign.
Thus the rash of posters in Vienna with Haider rolling up his sleeves or looking pensively into the future, each with the same tagline: "Jörg Haider: Das Original."
The 58-year-old lover of sharp words and even sharper suits has been re-energised by polls that show one-quarter of Austrian voters are ready to vote for the extreme right.
Unlike 1999, however, Haider will have to share the extremist pie with his protege- turned-pretender to Austria's extreme-right throne, FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache.
With his striking blue eyes and perma-tan, Strache has, literally and figuratively, stolen Haider's clothes. He has run a barnstorming campaign stirring up anti-EU resentment and anti-immigrant feeling, capturing 18 per cent support in the latest polls.
"We have nothing against foreigners, particularly poor people living to the east in less-well-off circumstances," said Strache in typical form at a recent rally in a rundown Vienna suburb.
"But we don't want them surging into our country just to fling themselves into our social-welfare hammock."
Derided by the larger parties, Strache has turned that derision into the FPÖ campaign slogan: "They're against him because he's for you!" Behind the derision, however, is real concern about the ideological sympathies of the 39-year-old former dental technician.
When Strache sued a news magazine for libel after it accused him of having neo-Nazi contacts, the court ruled against him, finding the magazine had presented an "adequate factual basis to demonstrate a certain nearness to national socialist ideas".
Strache is clever and quick-witted and his political opponents often find it hard to get a word in edgeways during television discussions with him.
"You just scare people," snapped ÖVP leader Wilhelm Molterer in a recent television debate, before silencing Strache with the killer line: "You're just a poor copy of Jörg Haider in the '80s."
Among Molterer's ÖVP colleagues, there is growing nostalgia for the days when they shared power with "Jörg Haider: Das Original". "What people forget is that, once in power, Haider was harmless," said one regional leader to The Irish Times. "Compared to Strache, we could easily go into government again with Haider."
Opinion polls show that Haider has doubled BZÖ support to 8 per cent in recent months by painting himself as the older, wiser and milder of Austria's two populist party leaders. He has dropped the harsher anti-immigrant rhetoric of the past in favour of demands for tax reform and tax credits to buffer people against the rocketing cost of living.
The FPÖ's Strache has presented similar proposals, while accusing his mentor of softening his immigrant line and selling out to regain the national office he lost.
Interestingly, Haider and Strache agree on one crucial point - the issue that prompted the snap election in the first place. Both men support a Social Democrat (SPÖ) proposal to introduce referendums in Austria for future EU treaties.
With just over a week to election day, political analysts suggest that cross-party agreement on this and other issues could result in an SPÖ-led government supported by either Strache or Haider. Or indeed both.
In recent days, Austria's original right-wing extremist has made none-too-subtle hints that he favours the idea.
"In the situation now, we must offer a responsible alternative to the outgoing coalition," said Haider on public television.
"I don't hold grudges against anyone, particularly not against former long-time companions. Fighting each other achieves nothing.
"Perhaps even Strache in his youthful exuberance will see that eventually."