Austria tries to come in from the cold

Austria is about to launch a diplomatic offensive to persuade its EU partners to lift the ban on bilateral contacts with Vienna imposed in protest against the participation in government of the far-right Freedom Party.

The Chancellor, Mr Wolfgang Schussel, plans to use Austria's current presidency of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to persuade European heads of government that they have nothing to fear from the new government.

Meanwhile, the Freedom Party leader, Dr Jorg Haider, promised yesterday that Austria would not use its veto to disrupt EU enlargement, despite his record of opposition to allowing new members to join.

"Austria belongs to the 15. We must co-operate in a trusting manner because unanimity is called for in some cases. We must ensure that the EU is able to act," he said. The conciliatory tone was in stark contrast to his claim two days earlier that Austria's EU partners had made a "tactical error" in view of the fact that they needed unanimous support for important EU decisions.

Seventy-seven per cent of Austrians regard the EU action against Vienna as unfair, compared to 20 per cent who think it was justified, according to an opinion poll yesterday. But only 28 per cent want Austria to leave the EU unless the ban is lifted, compared to 67 per cent who reject the idea of withdrawal.

Dr Schussel claimed yesterday that the EU reaction to his decision to share power with Dr Haider's party was orchestrated by a few states which put pressure on others to follow suit.

"This reaction was not so uniform. Some smaller countries were put under pressure and felt rolled over," he said.

Irish officials were sceptical about the wisdom of sanctioning Austria and were more sanguine than many of their EU counterparts about the presence of the far-right party in government. Before the 14 EU states issued their boycott threat last week, many individual countries warned Vienna of the consequences of forming a right-wing coalition but Dublin remained silent, explaining that such interventions were "not our style".

Dr Haider suggested yesterday that the former chancellor, Mr Viktor Klima, and President Thomas Klestil should face a parliamentary inquiry over their role in encouraging the EU boycott.

It would be "in the interests of those under suspicion to prove in a credible way to an investigative committee that they have nothing to do with it, that they have not committed some sort of political treason against Austria," he said.

Dr Schussel claimed yesterday that all the ministers in his government had "a clear, democratic and European background". But it has emerged that at least two Freedom Party ministers have a dubious record regarding attitudes to the Third Reich.

The Minister for Infrastructure, Mr Michael Schmid, used £8,000 of taxpayers' money to subsidise Aula, a neo-Nazi magazine, between 1993 and 1996. The new Justice Minister, Mr Michael Kruger, repeated Dr Haider's notorious description of concentration camps as "punishment camps", a term routinely used by neo-Nazi sympathisers.

Some Austrian commentators have suggested that Dr Haider, who will remain outside the government as governor of his home province of Carinthia, deliberately nominated a weak team of ministers in the hope that the new government would fail. But he denied yesterday that he intended to snipe at the coalition from the sidelines and seek new elections.