The Yuppie Fascist
HEILBRUNN, JACOB
The Yuppie Fascist Austrian politician Jörg Haider, the success story of the European Right BY JACOB HEILBRUNN Vienna, Austria Like Patrick Buchanan, Austria's far-right leader Jörg Haider...
...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...
...The dominant Socialist party has entirely co-opted the Conservatives, whose main objective is to conserve their shrinking share of power...
...Haider's critics portray him as a threat to democracy...
...As Lothar Hobele explains, "Haider attracted the Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar workers...
...Jacob Heilbrunn is a writer in Washington, D.C...
...Among male voters, the Freedom party is the biggest party...
...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...
...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...
...It's a curious understanding of democracy and tolerance...
...in any event, he had to flee to Bavaria until the 1938 Anschluss with Germany...
...And so, upon graduation, he moved to the state of Carinthia, on the Austrian border with Slovenia...
...The Haiders' son would become the instrument of their revenge on the new Austria...
...He calls for privatization of state industries and a flat tax, which seems to go over well with business...
...He's responsible," she said...
...In class-conscious Austria, the Albia fraternity also allowed the shoemaker's son to fraternize with lawyers' and doctors' sons...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...If the Freedom party's vote increases in the next election, the chancellery may be within his reach...
...Lothar Hobele, a young historian at Vienna University whose dissertation defends England's appeasement of Hitler, says that Haider "reflects a 1970s Austrian consensus...
...In fact, though, there isn't much Austrian democracy for him to threaten...
...A few years ago, Haider created a stir when he referred to concentration camps as "punishment camps...
...Why waste time fretting about Nazism, Haider seems to say, when Austrians have better things to do, like buy designer clothes...
...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...
...Haider's first hurdle was to undermine the man who had employed his father—Friedrich Peter, head of the Freedom party...
...Hobele said that his Nazi friends "all think they got a hard deal after 1945 and have been maligned...
...This isn't about Haider...
...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...
...There will be no second Waldheim affair," emphasizes Haider confederate and newspaper columnist Hans Janitschek...
...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...
...Indeed, Kreisky's denunciations of Israel and embrace of Yasser Arafat and Muammar Qaddafi helped prepare the way for Haider...
...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...
...Haider's coalition allies young entrepreneurs and disaffected Socialists with old Nazis...
...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...
...His address, cribbed from the Freedom party platform, was reprinted in the German National and Soldiers' Newspaper...
...Neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives wanted to alienate former Nazi voters, and the Socialists even discouraged émigrés from returning to the country after the war...
...Between 1988 and 1998, 405,000 people immigrated to Austria, a country of only 8 million...
...The Yuppie Fascist Austrian politician Jörg Haider, the success story of the European Right BY JACOB HEILBRUNN Vienna, Austria Like Patrick Buchanan, Austria's far-right leader Jörg Haider engages boldly in revisionism about World War II...
...He studied law at the University of Vienna, joined the anti-Semitic fraternity Silvania, and led the Freedom party's youth wing...
...She singled out Ariel Muzicant, head of the Federation of Jewish Communities, who had helped organize a rally against the Freedom party in November...
...The national mood has apparently changed...
...The office was decorated with dozens of photos of Haider skiing, jogging, and hobnobbing with celebrities...
...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...
...the American, in deference to Haider's love for the land of the Gap and Ralph Lauren...
...Born on January 19, 1950, in the village of Bad Goisen, Haider inherited a hatred of the Austrian establishment from his parents...
...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...
...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 is no jowly, balding populist ranting about the depredations of the global economy...
...Ironically, Haider profited further when Socialist chancellor Bruno Kreisky, himself a Jew, denounced Wiesenthal's "mafia methods...
...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...
...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...
...But not for long...
...Ever since the Allied occupation ended in 1955, the Socialists and Conservatives have carved up the Alpine republic between them in a system known as "Proporz," or proportionality...
...according to Austrian journalist Christa Zöchling'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...
...In truth, Austria has had a large influx of foreigners since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the wars in Yugoslavia...
...Haider's goal was to boot any remaining liberals out of the Freedom party and take it over himself...
...There were posters of Haider grinning and promising change on the walls...
...It's the same as the name of his estate, Bärental"—a property Haider's great-uncle bought from Jews forced to flee, at bargain-basement Nazi prices...
...Three large flags framed his desk: the Austrian...
...There is something for everyone...
...This may not disturb wealthy Socialists who live in downtown Vienna, but it incenses many traditional Socialist voters...
...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...
...His lather, Robert Haider, joined the Hitler Youth in 1929 at the age of 15...
...Indeed, in November, weeks after the election, the mood at Haider's headquarters, located behind the federal parliament in the Reichratsstrasse, was upbeat...
...The Socialist leadership drifted into rain-forest issues...
...He knows that the longer the Socialists and Conservatives cling together, the better his chances are in the next election...
...then, three years later, the SA...
...Neither domestic nor international pressure sufficient to keep Haider out of the government seems likely to develop...
...Then he praised Hitler's employment policies...
...This group, which would later become the Freedom party, was the gathering place for former Nazis supposedly integrated into an Austrian democracy...
...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...
...Even in Austria you can't win an election simply by appealing to old-timers...
...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...
...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...
...Before I left, Riess-Passer took me to Haider's office on the top floor to see the view of the Viennese skyline...
...Haider went on to new successes...
...It's because it has a bear on it," Riess-Passer told me...
...There, however, the resemblance to Buchanan ends...
...No matter what the aims were, the Wehrmacht was a splendid outfit...
...Most effective, perhaps, has been his call for "stopping further immigration to Austria," which allowed him to cut deeply into the Socialist voter base...
...So in high school, Jörg 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...
...The Austrian political establishment has gone into overdrive to keep Haider out of the government...
...More than that, Haider is hip, while his stodgy Conservative and Socialist adversaries look increasingly like Politburo-era dinosaurs...
...Riess-Passer said that, if true, this was their own fault...
...Haider retained his seat in parliament, and in April 1999, he won reelection as governor of Carinthia...
...Jörg's mother, Dorothea, was also a fervent Nazi...
...That year, Haider staged a coup in the Freedom party and became its leader...
...He doesn't speak with anyone from the Freedom party...
...Kreisky made the anti-Israeli remarks no one else could make...
...It saw itself as a victim of Hitler's aggression...
...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...
...the area around the Westbahnhof train station is inhabited mostly by foreigners, and in some schools over half the students are non-German-speakers...
...But Haider was undaunted...
...Socialism, in other words, may have been abandoned in Eastern Europe, but not in Austria...
...Unlike Germany, Austria never really faced up to its Nazi past...
...He participated in the failed 1934 Nazi putsch in Austria and may have been involved in the murder of a customs official...
...Kreisky wanted to bring Peter into a coalition...
...Eduard Stackl, deputy editor of the newspaper Der Standard, agrees: "The Freedom party has become the number one worker's party in Austria...
...and the Californian, featuring the state symbol...
...But the Nazi past could carry Haider only so far...
...At the same time, he emerged as one of Waldheim's most vociferous defenders...
...In Vienna, the city government has pushed the immigrants to the outskirts...
...The Jews of Vienna, she declared, were responsible for "whipping up anti-Semitism" through their attacks on 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...
...It's about Austria...
...The only real obstacle it faces is the hateful media campaign against Haider...
...A school teacher and member of the Nazi League of German Maidens, she was banned from teaching after the Second World War...
...Only once did Haider go too lar: 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...
...There, Haider did more than complain about foreigners...
...Most recently, he declared that Winston Churchill was as big a war criminal as Stalin...
...Instead, the 49-year-old Haider has the looks of a ski instructor and exploits them to the hilt...
...With the Conservatives already reduced to the number-three party, Haider's message continues to win new adherents...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
