A hardliner pointing Austrians to the right

When Jorg Haider faced the press in Vienna on Tuesday for the first time since his far-right Freedom Party shot into second place in Austria's elections, he stood in front of a blown-up photograph of himself surrounded by cheering supporters.

What few of those present noticed was that the picture had been doctored to change the message on a poster held by left-wing protesters.

Instead of "1938 reasons not to vote for Haider", a reference to the year of Hitler's annexation of Austria, it read "1938 reasons to vote for Haider". It was, according to the right-winger's aides, no more than a joke at the expense of their political opponents. But it summed up nicely the turnabout in Austria's attitude to Europe's most controversial political leader.

As foreign commentators expressed outrage and disbelief at Haider's success, with Israel threatening to reconsider its relations with Austria, Viennese politicians were more sanguine. Prof Alexander van der Bellen, the leader of Austria's Greens and one of Haider's most bitter ideological opponents, insisted that the rise of the far right did not mean that Austrians were abandoning democracy.

It is indeed misleading to describe Haider as a Nazi, although some of his supporters make no secret of their admiration for the Third Reich. And to understand his popularity, it is important to look at post-war Austria's unique political history and the 50-year stranglehold on power enjoyed by the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and People's Party conservatives.

Jorg Haider was born in Upper Austria in 1950 to parents who had been enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. His father joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 and became a member of the SA a year later. Haider's mother was a member of the Nazi youth movement for girls.

The young Haider's oratorical gifts became apparent while he was still a teenager and he won a public-speaking competition when he was 16 with a speech entitled "Are we Austrians German?" The speech, which questioned whether Austrians have a distinct national identity, was reprinted in the Deutsche National Zeitung, an extreme right-wing weekly published by Dr Gerhard Frey, a neo-Nazi millionaire based in Munich.

Haider was a gifted student and qualified as a lawyer, but from the age of 20 politics has been his passion. He joined the Freedom Party, traditionally the political home of Austrian ex-Nazis, as a left-wing rebel but moved steadily to the right after he became a member of parliament in 1979.

When Haider became party leader in 1986, the Freedom Party enjoyed the support of only 5 per cent of Austrians, compared to the 27.2 per cent it won on Sunday. Most of this success is due to Haider's personal appeal as a dynamic, youthful critic of the status quo.

Married with two children, Haider likes to pose as a happy family man, relaxing on his 35,000-acre estate in his home state of Carinthia. He has always believed that the most effective route to national power was through regional government and he was just 39 when he became governor of Carinthia in 1989.

He had to resign two years later after he told the state parliament: "An orderly employment policy was carried out by the Third Reich, which the government in Vienna cannot manage."

Haider has courted similar controversy on other occasions, notably by praising former Waffen SS officers as "respectable" war veterans.

But he denies charges that he is anti-Semitic and has made highly publicised visits to the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. If Haider's attitude to the Nazis is hard to pin down, so too is his general political ideology. A former enthusiast for European political union who is now one of Europe's most prominent Euro-sceptics, he claims to be a conservative admirer of the free market but proposes massive increases in social welfare spending.

On one issue alone has Haider been consistent throughout his career - that of foreign immigration to Austria. Convinced that immigration offers no benefits to Austrian society, he wants to stop foreigners arriving and to deport any non-Austrians who break the law.

"We've got the Poles who concentrate on car theft. We've got the former Yugoslavs who are burglary experts. We've got the Turks who are superbly organised in the heroin trade. And we've got the Russians who are experts in blackmail and mugging," he claims.

Although few Austrians support Haider's more extreme proposals for segregating Austrian schoolchildren from foreigners and limiting some social welfare benefits to ethnic Austrians, his xenophobic rhetoric no longer provokes outrage. Weary of a political system that divides most plum jobs between supporters of the two big parties, many Austrians are ready to give Haider a chance.