The Yuppie Fascist

There, however, the resemblance to Buchanan ends. Haider is no jowly, balding populist ranting about the depredations of the global economy. Instead, the 49-year-old Haider has the looks of a ski instructor and exploits them to the hilt. To the fury of the conservative People’s party and the horror of the leading Socialist party, the bungee-jumping, marathon-running Haider has become the coolest politician in Austria. By deftly blending nostalgia for Nazism, hatred of foreigners, and a pro-free market message, he has managed to overtake the Conservatives and vault his historically marginal Freedom party into the number two spot, winning more than 29 percent of the vote in the national election on October 3. He’s done it by becoming an exotic hybrid — a yuppie fascist.

Haider’s critics portray him as a threat to democracy. In fact, though, there isn’t much Austrian democracy for him to threaten. Ever since the Allied occupation ended in 1955, the Socialists and Conservatives have carved up the Alpine republic between them in a system know as “Proporz,” or proportionality. Every major-party member carries a “party book,” which is either red (for Socialists) or black (for Conservatives), and in the innumerable state-controlled activities — banking, mining, broadcasting, teaching, transportation, you name it — jobs are meted out so as to achieve the proper distribution of red and black. The dominant Socialist party has entirely co-opted the Conservatives, whose main objective is to conserve their shrinking share of power. Socialism, in other words, may have been abandoned in Eastern Europe, but not in Austria.

In this context, Haider has actually been able to depict himself as a democrat, a kind of freedom fighter battling an encrusted left-wing establishment bent not only on enforcing a politically correct interpretation of the Nazi past but also on controlling the individual’s economic decisions. More than that, Haider is hip, while his stodgy Conservative and Socialist adversaries look increasingly like Politburo-era dinosaurs. With the Conservatives already reduced to the number-three party, Haider’s message continues to win new adherents. Why waste time fretting about Nazism, Haider seems to say, when Austrians have better things to do, like buy designer clothes?

Born on January 19, 1950, in the village of Bad Goisen, Haider inherited a hatred of the Austrian establishment from his parents. His father, Robert Haider, joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 at the age of 15; then, three years later, the SA. He participated in the failed 1934 Nazi putsch in Austria and may have been involved in the murder of a customs official; in any event, he had to flee to Bavaria until the 1938 Anschluss with Germany. Jorg’s mother, Dorothea, was also a fervent Nazi. A school teacher and member of the Nazi League of German Maidens, she was banned from teaching after the Second World War. In those years, Robert supplemented his shoemaker’s income by working on the side as a party secretary for the former SS officer Friedrich Peter in the newly established League of Independents. This group, which would later become the Freedom party, was the gathering place for former Nazis supposedly integrated into an Austrian democracy. The Haiders’ son would become the instrument of their revenge on the new Austria.

Unlike Germany, Austria never really faced up to its Nazi past. It saw itself as a victim of Hitler’s aggression. Neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives wanted to alienate former Nazi voters, and the Socialists even discouraged emigres from returning to the country after the war. So in high school, Jorg had no reservations about joining the Albia fraternity, where he and his chums practiced the four basic fencing moves on a straw doll labeled with the name of Simon Wiesenthal, the legendary Nazi-hunter. In class-conscious Austria, the Albia fraternity also allowed the shoemaker’s son to fraternize with lawyers’ and doctors’ sons; according to Austrian journalist Christa Zochling’s new biography of Haider, Light and Shadows of a Career, this “hermetic circle” of right-wing upper-crust types further shaped his views, not to mention the fact that most of his teachers had belonged to the Nazi party. Haider cut his political teeth at an early age: In 1966, he won first prize in a debate contest in Innsbruck with a speech about the “mingling of peoples and races” in Austria. His address, cribbed from the Freedom party platform, was reprinted in the German National and Soldiers’ Newspaper.

Haider went on to new successes. He studied law at the University of Vienna, joined the anti-Semitic fraternity Silvania, and led the Freedom party’s youth wing. Although the 1968 student revolts heightened his loathing of the left, Haider shared the left’s suspicion of institutions, which is why some Austrians call him the Napoleon of 1968 — a conservative who deployed the tactics of the student radicals to conservative ends.

Haider’s goal was to boot any remaining liberals out of the Freedom party and take it over himself. And so, upon graduation, he moved to the state of Carinthia, on the Austrian border with Slovenia. There, the constant influx of Slovenes, coupled with the memory of Yugoslavia’s demands for Carinthian territory after the Second World War, provided a backdrop conducive to the flourishing of his movement. There, Haider did more than complain about foreigners; he created a new base for the Freedom party, visiting discos night after night to attract young voters, until the party became known as Haider’s “Buberlpartei,” the boys’ party.

Haider’s first hurdle was to undermine the man who had employed his father — Friedrich Peter, head of the Freedom party. This project got a boost in 1975, when Simon Wiesenthal exposed Peter’s membership in the SS, damaging the leader’s standing in the party. Ironically, Haider profited further when Socialist chancellor Bruno Kreisky, himself a Jew, denounced Wiesenthal’s “mafia methods”; Kreisky wanted to bring Peter into a coalition. Indeed, Kreisky’s denunciations of Israel and embrace of Yasser Arafat and Muammar Qaddafi helped prepare the way for Haider. Lothar Hobele, a young historian at Vienna University whose dissertation defends England’s appeasement of Hitler, says that Haider “reflects a 1970s Austrian consensus. . . . Kreisky made the anti-Israeli remarks no one else could make.” Hobele, who has close ties to Haider and the Freedom party, added that Haider’s comments on the past are bound to appeal to Austrians; Hobele said that his Nazi friends “all think they got a hard deal after 1945 and have been maligned. . . . No matter what the aims were, the Wehrmacht was a splendid outfit.”

In 1986, Haider got an additional boost, when an international scandal erupted over the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim, president of Austria and former secretary general of the United Nations. That year, Haider staged a coup in the Freedom party and became its leader. At the same time, he emerged as one of Waldheim’s most vociferous defenders.

Only once did Haider go too far: In 1995, he declared that Hitler’s employment policies were superior to those of the current government, and he was forced to resign as governor of Carinthia. But not for long. Haider retained his seat in parliament, and in April 1999, he won reelection as governor of Carinthia. He promptly awarded Austrian citizenship to the son of the last Austrian rabbi, who lives in Israel — an act of which he boasts whenever he is challenged over his benevolent statements about Nazis. Haider also has tried to provide himself additional insurance in matters Jewish by bringing on board the novelist Peter Sichrovsky, whose parents fled the Holocaust. Sichrovsky’s latest book declares anti-fascism to be Communist dogma repackaged by the Western European left. He is currently a Freedom party delegate to the European Parliament.

But the Nazi past could carry Haider only so far. Even in Austria you can’t win an election simply by appealing to old-timers. Haider’s coalition allies young entrepreneurs and disaffected Socialists with old Nazis. There is something for everyone. He calls for privatization of state industries and a flat tax, which seems to go over well with business. Most effective, perhaps, has been his call for “stopping further immigration to Austria,” which allowed him to cut deeply into the Socialist voter base. As Lothar Hobele explains, “Haider attracted the Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar workers. The Socialist leadership drifted into rain-forest issues. Among male voters, the Freedom party is the biggest party.” Eduard Stackl, deputy editor of the newspaper Der Standard, agrees: “The Freedom party has become the number one worker’s party in Austria.”

In truth, Austria has had a large influx of foreigners since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the wars in Yugoslavia. Between 1988 and 1998, 405,000 people immigrated to Austria, a country of only 8 million. In Vienna, the city government has pushed the immigrants to the outskirts; the area around the Westbahnhof train station is inhabited mostly by foreigners, and in some schools over half the students are non-German-speakers. This may not disturb wealthy Socialists who live in downtown Vienna, but it incenses many traditional Socialist voters. So alarmed did the Socialists become at Haider’s inroads among their voters that on election-eve, interior minister Karl Schlogel announced that immigration would have to end.

The Austrian political establishment has gone into overdrive to keep Haider out of the government. After the October election, the Socialists didn’t even want to meet with him, while the Conservatives declared that, since they had come in third, they had no responsibility for putting together a coalition. But Haider was undaunted. He knows that the longer the Socialists and Conservatives cling together, the better his chances are in the next election. And the more the foreign press and the Israeli government attack him (Israeli foreign minister David Levy threatened to sever relations with Austria should Haider enter the government), the more popular he gets.

Indeed, in November, weeks after the election, the mood at Haider’s headquarters, located behind the federal parliament in the Reichratsstrasse, was upbeat. There were posters of Haider grinning and promising change on the walls. A headline in the party’s New Freedom Newspaper attacked Socialist chancellor Viktor Klima, demanding “An End to Ostracism: Klima must speak with the Freedom Party!”

Rushing in from a parliamentary meeting. Susanne Riess-Passer, second in command in the party, explained to me that Austria desperately needs “structural change,” which is one reason the Freedom party is bound to keep growing. The only real obstacle it faces is the hateful media campaign against Haider. According to the leading Jewish organization in Austria, the Federation of Jewish Communities, the number of attacks on Jews rose dramatically in the last weeks of the election campaign. Riess-Passer said that, if true, this was their own fault. The Jews of Vienna, she declared, were responsible for “whipping up anti-Semitism” through their attacks on the Freedom party. She singled out Ariel Muzicant, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities, who had helped organize a rally against the Freedom party in November. “He’s responsible,” she said. “He doesn’t speak with anyone from the Freedom party. It’s a curious understanding of democracy and tolerance.”

Before I left, Riess-Passer took me to Haider’s office on the top floor to see the view of the Viennese skyline. The office was decorated with dozens of photos of Haider skiing, jogging, and hobnobbing with celebrities. Three large flags framed his desk: the Austrian; the American, in deference to Haider’s love for the land of the Gap and Ralph Lauren; and the Californian, featuring the state symbol. “It’s because it has a bear on it,” Riess-Passer told me. “It’s the same as the name of his estate, Barental” — a property Haider’s great-uncle bought from Jews forced to flee, at bargain-basement Nazi prices.

We walked past the flags, out to the special raised platform Haider has had installed on the roof next to his office so he can gaze at the federal chancellery. If the Freedom party’s vote increases in the next election, the chancellery may be within his reach. Neither domestic nor international pressure sufficient to keep Haider out of the government seems likely to develop. The national mood has apparently changed. “There will be no second Waldheim affair,” emphasizes Haider confederate and newspaper columnist Hans Janitschek. “This isn’t about Haider. It’s about Austria.”

Jacob Heilbrunn is a writer in Washington, D.C.