Jorg Haider's grasp for power
Baubock, Rainer
MANY WESTERN liberals have always mistrusted the Austrian postwar conversion to liberal democracy, and recent political events appear to confirm their wariness. In the last year's...
...Haider skillfully appeals to the resulting sentiments of narcissistic insult by interpreting any critique of his own politics as an attack by the outside world against Austria...
...But all this is still a far cry from what neoliberalism has brought to other European countries...
...THE SECOND reaction is sheer amazement...
...A bunker mentality provides fertile ground for Haider's politics of resentment...
...The country had been governed by a grand coalition of VP and SP from 1945 to 1966 and then again from 1986 to 2000...
...Austrian neocorporatism was not merely a system of organizing elite consensus, but also of patronage...
...Excluding him from power made him strong...
...And even if opposition were the Austrian SP's best chance to stop its further ideological as well as electoral decline, I would still contend that what's good for Social Democrats is not necessarily good for the country...
...True, the protests from abroad and his bid for power led him to formally apologize—not for what he had said, but only for remarks "attributed to him...
...Having never been part of the system, the FP was in an ideal position to pick up the pieces...
...As a result, there was no real choice between different government options...
...There is nothing in the program of the new government that would jeopardize further economic integration or enlargement of the common market...
...Crime rates are down and still falling...
...All Schassel had to do was to eliminate the SP's options while appearing to negotiate in good faith...
...In their analysis, Haider was brought to power by the same political system that had sought to exclude him...
...The SP fought hard to stay in power and keep the FP out, but it was unwilling to bring forward a new leadership that could have lent credibility to the promise of a different political style...
...But what about France...
...more important, there is growing social inequality and an expanding sector of precarious jobs...
...They do not believe that Haider's success is due to the dark side of the Austrian soul...
...So Haider, it is said, will be tamed once he is in power...
...He lures the children of social partnership away from their traditional parties by playing variations on their own familiar melodies...
...After all, Social Democrats and Conservatives have learned the lesson of the Waldheim years and publicly accepted Austria's responsibility for its large share in Nazi atrocities...
...He has praised Hitler's employment policies and defended the "honor of the war-time generation" at a meeting of Waffen SS veterans...
...The first holds that running the country might eventually turn the party into a respectable democratic force...
...In order to re-establish a genuinely political space, the democratic left will have to articulate its (different) ideologies and give a voice to those interests that have been silenced and are now under attack...
...Well, one lesson to be learned from France is that it is possible to have cohabitation and still push back a racist party by firmly pledging its permanent exclusion from power...
...Nor are Haider's voters exactly the underdogs of society...
...Even during the years of singleparty government, a cross-party consensus on major economic and social policy issues was achieved through integrating the unions and employers' federations into the policy-making process at the highest levels...
...This is, however, a DISSENT / Spring 2000 25 POLITICS ABROAD non sequitur, and there is also empirical evidence against the argument...
...One does not turn a crook into an acceptable partner simply by accepting him as a partner...
...Since the mid eighties, the end of "Austrokeynesian" economics, the privatization of a large state-owned industrial sector, and the general decline of party organizations and voter loyalty have shattered the social bases of the old regime...
...Foreign journalists and others who have closely followed Austria's development in recent years rub their eyes...
...The Social Democrats' dilemma was that both options open to them—a continuation of the coalition or a minority government— required Conservative cooperation...
...Even if Haider tones down his radical rhetoric for a while, it is not his future behavior, but his past policies that have brought his party into government...
...The other is to build networks of resistance in civil society...
...Bringing his party into government is the only way of breaking the spell...
...Of course, right-wing parties of this kind have been electorally successful in other European states—three weeks after Haider's triumph, Christoph Blocher's SVP won 23 percent in the Swiss elections on a similar platform...
...Until January, opinion polls consistently showed that a continuation of the old two-party government was by far the most popular option...
...On February 4, they formed a new government with Jorg Haider's FP...
...There have indeed been periodically exploding budget deficits, and the Maastricht criteria for monetary stability have forced the government to cut back on public spending...
...Haider was willing to stay out of the government if he could get his party in...
...The conservative interregnum in Germany was not much shorter, though less harsh, and the subsequent, thoroughly disappointing, performance of the red-green coalition does not make this an attractive option for neighboring Austria...
...Its task is not to restore a past elite consensus but to rebuild popular political arenas and a culture of public conflict...
...The end of the cold war and Austria's integration into the EU have shattered the myth of an Austrian Sonderweg or "separate path...
...One is to persistently ostracize him and his party within the EU...
...A racist party in a national government participates also in governing the EU...
...The other big surprise for observers throughout Europe was how the ruling coali24 DISSENT / Spring 2000 tion reacted to the election results...
...RAINER BAUBOCK is a political scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Research Unit for Institutional Change and European Integration...
...The first articulates Western doubts about Austria's liberal democratic credentials...
...The third reason is more plausible...
...26 n DISSENT / Spring 2000...
...I wish I could share this optimism...
...It was the social democrat Bruno Kreisky who prevented the FP's disappearance from the political scene...
...The FP-VP coalition finally draws a clear line between opposed ideological positions...
...In the October elections FP posters called for an end to Uberfremdung or "foreign infiltration," a term from the vocabulary of the Third Reich...
...Its historic origins lie in the "third camp" of German nationalism that had competed with Socialists and Christian Conservatives since the later years of the Hapsburg monarchy...
...Haider's brand of national populism has two weaknesses...
...Social Democrats have been out of government for only four years, from 1966 to 1970, and ruled alone thereafPOLITICS ABROAD ter until 1986...
...After 1945, the remnants of this movement, for obvious reasons, were shut out of the effort to build a new Austrian nation...
...The two will work only when they are combined...
...True also, he has withdrawn his denunciation of the Austrian nation as an "ideological miscarriage" and poses now as an Austrian rather than a German nationalist...
...Haider has seized the void created by the degeneration of social partnership...
...Especially in Israel and the United States, the recent events have raised concern and anger but little surprise...
...An anti-FP movement within Austria would have to reach beyond the left and avoid being choked by a Social Democratic embrace...
...His election campaigns have always played on racist sentiments against the roughly 15 percent of the population who are immigrants...
...Haider stands for the ugly side of Austria—its Nazi past and its attempt after 1945 to avoid Germanstyle Vergangenheitsbewaltigung or longing to come to terms with the past by claiming to have been "Hitler's first victim...
...ICAN sEE only two long-term strategies that could stop Haider's ascent to full power...
...But why on earth do these people protest...
...In January, the Conservatives provoked a final break with the SP, shattering the coalition that had ruled Austria for thirteen years...
...It was the ruling coalition parties who kept insisting, contrary to all evidence, that Austria was not a country of immigration...
...The old coalition was held together only by an agreement to keep Haider out...
...When the major political forces in Austria abandoned their attempt to keep Haider's party out of government, its ascent became a European concern...
...But the EU has become a political project engaged in far-ranging legislative activity...
...Putting Austria under quarantine draws a line...
...A third melody is about immigrants coming to work in Austria...
...Unfortunately, there are quite different tales to be told from the experience of Britain and Germany...
...Paradoxically, Haider continues this tradition of delegated activism, but his claim is to fight for the man in the street against those in power who have abandoned him...
...It lacks any consistent ideology and it mobilizes resentment but does not organize interests...
...Political scientists have analyzed Austria as a model of neocorporatism and consociational democracy...
...Austria's economy has clearly profited from the country's membership in the European Union...
...Kreisky's foreign policy fostered illusions of grandeur...
...Another melody is about Austria's place in the world...
...The applicant states east of the former Iron Curtain will be tested by their performance in these areas...
...This regime of "social partnership" secured extraordinary social and political stability and has remained largely intact even in recent years...
...It is a bitter irony that Kreisky's stunning success in breaking Conservative dominance in Austrian politics has now ousted his own party from power...
...In the last year's general elections the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FP) won 27 percent of the vote, beating the conservative People's Party (VP), though by less than five hundred votes, and finishing in second place after the Social Democrats (SP...
...He is an opposition politician by nature who will never miss an opportunity to attack...
...Haider's xenophobic propaganda appeared to push the government parties, but in fact he was often trailing behind their actual immigration policies...
...Haider has already served as governor of Carinthia (a federal province) twice, and this has certainly not diminished his political standing...
...sharing power with him should weaken him...
...THE THIRD reaction was that of Austrian democratic leftists and liberals...
...In the short run, this will make it difficult to cure the disease domestically...
...Its protracted and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with its long-time partners strengthened the sense that it was time for a radical change...
...In January, the other fourteen governments in the Council of the European Union (EU) took the unprecedented step of threatening a member state with the suspension of bilateral contacts and a radical downscaling of diplomatic relations...
...The VP had mobilized its voters by announcing that they would go into opposition if they were overtaken by the FP, but when that happened, their chairman Wolfgang Schassel opted instead for the chancellery in a coalition with the FP...
...Haider's electoral support articulates a diffuse protest vote rather than endorsement for right-wing extremism...
...He has made great inroads among young blue-collar workers, a group where the FP has now more support than the Social Democrats, but his party also attracts yuppies and successful entrepreneurs...
...He was eventually sworn in as Austria's new chancellor, at the mercy of Haider—a personal success that may lead his party into the abyss...
...His strategy in 1970 was to secure long-term hegemony for the SP by strengthening the FP and thus splitting the "bourgeois camp...
...Moreover, the EU is gradually moving toward common standards for fundamental rights and the treatment of minorities...
...There are virtually no strikes or other serious social unrest...
...Generations of voters have been educated to believe that politics is not their business and that social progress can be had only by avoiding conflict...
...It was the political stalemate of the old coalition regime that provided him with an opposition bonus...
...The argument that once in power he would not be able to hold on for long requires a severe underestimation both of Haider's political intelligence and of the tectonic shifts in Austrian society that have brought him to the top...
...What is unique about the Austrian case is the steadiness of the FP's ascent since 1986, the realistic possibility that it might become the strongest party in future elections, and the suicidal policies of Haider's political opponents...
...The radical right everywhere will correctly understand this as a historic precedent...
...Conservatives and Social Democrats had again achieved a quite comfortable majority of 64 percent of the seats in Parliament...
...In the next election there will be a polarization between these two blocs and, as a result, both the SP and VP will regain their lost identities...
...Yet with all DISSENT / Spring 2000 n 23 POLITICS ABROAD his remarkable turnabouts he has remained consistent in one respect...
...The spoils of economic growth—jobs, public housing, social services—were distributed through party organizations and economic interest groups...
...Small and neutral Austria proudly saw itself as a respected player in world politics...
...THREE DIFFERENT arguments have been suggested as to why the FP in power might be the lesser evil...
...In recent years, these same parties have radically cut back family reunification...
...Kurt Waldheim's election as federal president in 1986 came to symbolize an Austrian collective amnesia...
...Export industries and tourism are booming, and last year inflation fell to a record low of 0.6 percent...
...One common answer is that they are the "losers of modernization...
...They were not at all surprised, had seen what was coming for a long time, and, strangely enough, seemed almost relieved when it happened...
...Why would a well-established government in an extremely stable country commit political suicide...
...A second argument, the opposite of the first, counts on Haider's incorrigibility...
...Yet over the whole period of Haider's rise, Austria has had one of the lowest unemployment rates in Western Europe...
...Paradoxically, shunning a member state is an important step forward in the process of European integration...
...Haider's phenomenal success has led to three kinds of reaction...
...This is good for democracy, and it will offer new opportunities for the left...
...But in the long run, Austria cannot afford to remain isolated in Europe...
...One melody is about politics for the "little man...
...Haider is the pied piper of Austrian politics...
...Pressure only from abroad can still make Haider a popular hero domestically...
...What has, however, changed is its capacity to integrate the rank and file...
...Yet both parties interpreted the election as a defeat for their long-term strategy of excluding the FP from government...
...Now that Austria is part of the European Union any government has a limited scope for action and is under constant observation...
...the comparatively generous system of welfare benefits and retirement pensions has not suffered severe cutbacks...
...The alternative to this government is a coalition of the SP with a Green Party that has been gaining strength since October...
...As I write this, Austria has plunged into the deepest foreign policy crisis of its postwar history...
...In Britain, it took Labour a long time to come out of the tunnel, and when it finally emerged it had turned into a different sort of party...
...This argument is the Conservatives' excuse, and it is a weak one...
...Jorg Haider, who took over the FP leadership in the same year, stands for a different attitude of resentful remembrance...
Vol. 47 • April 2000 • No. 2
