Austria's Brown Shadow

...Nonetheless, the "Affair Frischenschlager" has probably done serious damage to the clout of the Freedom Party...

...Frischenschlager's greeting Reder did not come out of a clear blue sky either...

...While the FPO had some supporters in conservative rural areas, in Vienna its organizations existed in only a few districts...

...Into this vacuum have stepped two groups that lie wholly outside the traditional scheme: the environmentalists, or "Greens,' and the nationalist wing of the Freedom Party...

...During his first 16 months in office, Sinowatz was beset by his own party's internal squabbles, an inheritance from Kreisky' s time centering to a great extent on the personality of ex-Finance Minister Hannes Androsch...

...To the well-publicized disgust of his party's Brown wing, Frischenschlager admitted that formally receiving Reder had been a mistake, asked the pardon of the people of Israel and expressed his own good will toward the Jews...

...Steger, formerly a member of the Vienna Boys' Choir, rapidly rose from local party functionary to provincial party leader in Vienna to vice chancellor in 1983...

...In the ensuing uproar the FPO's "Nationals" came out of the shadows long enough to suggest that its evolution from "the rump of the Nazi Party" intoagen-uine liberal party has been, at the minimum, incomplete...

...The clash was tame compared with similar occurrences elsewhere in Western Europe, yet it greatly embarrassed Sinowatz and he subsequently ordered an indefinite delay of construction...

...At the end of March, though, the battered coalition survived another internal test...

...That, of course, pleased no one...

...Yet in the '60s and early '70s the Freedom Party was a dubious, if not sinister, proposition...

...Unwilling to let Salzburg go its own way on business hours, the central authorities were finally humiliated when a suit they had brought against the governor of the conservative province was tossed out of court for being incompetently drafted...

...The conservative Austrian People's Party (OVP) has been doing its best of late to torment the " Red-Blue" alliance, but under its decidedly lackluster leader, Alois Mock, it presents no decisive alernative to the operetta at Ballhausplatz...

...A number of senior SPO officials are said to have advocated dumping their junior partners and calling early elections in hopes of using the Reder incident to gain enough seats in Parliament to govern alone...

...The whole episode will make it a lot harder for the FPO to be considered an acceptable coalition partner in any future People's Party government...

...By the time it decided to go ahead last fall, environmentalists had been able to organize against the project and take full advantage of Austrians' highly sentimental attitudes toward animals and nature...

...Shortly thereafter came a confrontation with various environmental groups over the building of a hydroelectric power plant at Hainburg, near Vienna...

...Neither camp, moreover, is likely to better its position...

...The first FPO leader was Anton Rheinthaller, an SS officer and participant in the National Socialist Arthur Seys-Inquart government of 1938...

...In any event, having rejected the Socialists and the OVP, the one parliamentary party they could turn to where they might realize their ambitions and ideals was the FPO...

...If not made in heaven, the match does not seem entirely coincidental...

...In fact, the FPO may even be expelled from its present coalition with the Socialists...

...A Social Democrat and opponent of German nationalism and the Nazi Anschluss in the '30s, Kreisky returned to his homeland after the War...

...Such counsels may yet prevail...

...The divided Greens, meanwhile, are even farther outside the mainstream of Austrian life than the FPO...

...Made up of old-style German nationalists and ex-Nazis who were not promising prospects for rehabilitation into good democrats, it became the Freedom Party in 1956...

...They include union chief Anton Benya and FedPadraic Sweeney, a new contributor to these pages, is a freelance journalist who is currently based in Vienna...

...But the FPO, fearful of losing its share of the protest vote on the Left, adamantly opposed the facility's use, as did the environmentalists, forcing Sinowatz to accept shutdown...

...the two major Green groups share barely another 7 per cent of the electorate between them and have no seats in Parliament...

...Now that the surviving prominent figures of Austria's reconstruction are growing old and leaving the political stage, however, the postwar arrangements are running low on energy and ideas...

...It has been noted that the fathers (and, in one known case, the mother) of several of the newcomers were active in the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung and the Blood Order...

...Since Kreisky's departure, Fred Sinowatz, his successor as chancellor and Socialist Party (SPO) leader, has largely been unable to control his Cabinet effectively...

...The FPO is supported by merely 7 per cent of the voters and has just 11 seats in the 183-seat National Assembly...

...unions and several important Austrian companies resented the Chancellor's waffle because the jobs and business the power plant represented were cast into limbo...

...The Socialists' junior coalition partner, the FPO, is torn by a struggle between younger, allegedly liberal figures, mostly Viennese, and a generally older provincial faction that continues to hear the siren song of Greater Germany...

...The bold stroke was supposed to get rid of those who were too close to Kreisky, freeing Sinowatz to make his mark, but things have gone downhill from that day onward...

...Friends going back to student days at the University of Vienna, they all belonged to the liberal Ot-tersee Circle...

...The same Friedrich Peter—who would be denied a post in the Socialist-FPO coalition because of his background—conducted the discussions that resulted in the young Ottersee Circle liberals joining the Freedom Party...

...The paradox, of course, is that a distinct minority sunk the undertaking...

...InthecaseofHainburg, the government put off a decision to begin construction (specifically, to start felling trees in the Au Forest, where the facility is to be built) foran extended period...

...Once the SPO and the OVP had sorted through and absorbed the bulk of the minor Nazis in the late '40s, another group emerged, the United Independents...

...Small wonder when a social democratic party can link arms with a group such as the FPO despite its Nazi associations, and a conservative party cannot gain advantage from the compromising alliance...

...The Defense Minister is the son of a Hitlerite killed during the War...

...Nevertheless, it has succeeded in tapping public anxieties, exploiting the folly of politicians, and frustrating their plans, especially concerning energy...

...As people here frequently observed toward the close of his almost 13 years at the helm, no one except Emperor Franz Josef governed Aust ria longer in this century...

...Today the former Ottersee members insist they were attracted to liberalism's tolerance and emphasis on personal freedom...

...FPO parliamentary leader Fried-rich Peter himself reached the rank of colonel in the SS and served on the Russian Front...

...Less formal general agreement has also been important in formulating a foreign policy flexible enough to accommodate or neutralize the conflicting demands of the two superpower blocs the country straddles...

...Environmentalists were not satisfied, because the project was not permanently killed...

...That said, it must also be observed that both forces will probably continue to exert an inordinate amount of influence in the absence of strong personalities or principles in the parties representing Austria's postwar Socialist and Christian democratic traditions...

...In September 1984 Sinowatz surprised the country, sacking five Socialist ministers—among them one of the most contentious and one of the most Left-wing—plus several minor officials...

...In addition, it appears that single-minded opposition to all power plants is cutting into their popular appeal on specific issues...

...The minister's decision to welcome the ailing Reder, and to have him transported to a military hospital, touched off the most publicized of a series of episodes that have shaken the practically bucolic tranquillity long characteristic of this country's politics...

...Ironically, the hapless Defense Minister is a liberal...

...He and party Chairman Norbert Steger are part of a group of men currently in their early 40s who moved into the FPO in the beginning of the last decade...

...But before long this party in search of a future discovered what it was looking for in the embrace of the young Ottersee idealists, who were eager to find a political home...

...First there was a dispute with the provincial government of Salzburg, seeking permission to ignore Federal law and allow local stores to stay open on a religious holiday in the commercially important month before Christmas...

...Yet when he arrived in Graz Friedhelm Frischenschlager, Austria's defense minister and a leading figure in the country's Freedom Party (FPO), was there to meet him...

...But in the end he let the old Nazis down...

...eral Chamber of Commerce chief Rudolf Sallinger, key members of the Social Partnership...

...Other old stalwarts of lesser rank still in harness are likely to depart in the next few years...

...At issue was a decision on whether to continue mothballing Austria's only nuclear power plant, to begin preparing it for operation, or to scrap it...

...Where economic matters are concerned it has virtually been institutionalized in the Social Partnership, which brings the trade unions and the business community together under official auspices to make major decisions...

...More principled opponents of the alliance, like Transport Minister Ferdinand Lacina, object to continuing the Red-Blue coalition on the grounds that the Socialist Party cannot remain true to itself under the existing arrangement...

...The Green movement, actually split into two competing parties, has never been as significant in Austria as in West Germany...

...He went on to become foreign minister, and then—at least internationally—a controversial head of government...

...The FPO is preoccupied with internal struggles that are destined to persist, and in any event can have access to high office only so long as the SPO and OVP reject a return to a "grand coalition...

...they were put off by the Leftist extremism of the late '60s and did not find comfort in the clericalism that then characterized the conservatives...

...Consensus has served Austria well for 40 years, starting with the formation of a provisional government in 1945...

...The liberals then managed to beat back an effort by the young Right-wing boss of the Car-inthiaFPO, Jorg Haider, tooustSteger as chairman...

...No expatriate businessman or cosmopolite, the former SS Slurmbahnfiihrer(colonel) had been in prison for his part in the deaths of 1,800 Italian civilians at the end of World War II...

...Former Nazis, and indeed SS men, occupied its top positions...

...Thus the site was occupied by several thousand demonstrators, mostly students, for a few days in early December, making it necessary to have truncheon-wielding police drive them out...

...Although both are small, in the absence of a vigorous mainstream they are providing all the fizz there is these days in the nation's political life...

...For the moment the nationalists have been sent packing back to the hinterlands of Upper Austria...

...It was heavily criticized by the People's Party and has aroused the contempt of at least some important OVP figures...

...By the early '70s this remnant of evil days was gradually heading for extinction...

...After a suitable pause for the winter holidays, Sinowatz' troubles resumed with a bang when Frischenschlager journeyed to greet the returning War criminal Reder...

...The best known of the recent retirees is ex-chancellor Bruno Kreisky, who stepped down following an electoral setback in April 1983...

...Having brought widespread condemnation on himself and the FPO, he turned around and gave the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot a conciliatory interview...

...The Socialists dearly wanted the plant to go into operation, and the OVP, albeit unwilling to bail them out, approves of nuclear energy as well...

...The old-timers found the younger generation largely indifferent to their dark, interwar passions...