Reversal of Fortune

The volatile Jörg Haider has always regarded his far-right Freedom Party as a kind of personal possession. It’s natural, then, that he should have triggered its near demise. In a dizzying two weeks, the self-styled puppet master of Austrian politics split with his party’s top government ministers, broke up the ruling coalition, announced his intention to seek a return to the leadership in early elections expected in November — and then abruptly changed his mind. Appearing last week on Austrian TV, Haider claimed he had been approached and threatened outside a restaurant in Klagenfurt. Invoking the name of murdered Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, he claimed he was no longer interested in the top job. “I have to give way to violence,” he said.

But the biggest threat to him comes from Freedomite faithful who might not have backed his leadership bid. At a party meeting in Linz he was severely criticized for bringing down the government. “This is the end of the Haider era,” says Peter Sichrovsky, the outgoing general secretary of the party, who resigned last week in protest over Haider’s “putsch.” Sichrovsky remorsefully adds, “We failed to get the party out of the extremist corner.” Though the party will contest the elections without Haider, support last week fell to 12%, down from a high of 27% almost three years ago.

What happened? The party may have been a victim of its own success. Six months after it sprang to prominence in 1999, Haider relinquished the leadership because of the uproar created by his xenophobic pronouncements. But when he returned to Carinthia, where he is governor, he left behind in Vienna a group of ministers who — together with their coalition partners, the conservative People’s Party of Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel — managed to accomplish a few things. They slashed spending, briefly eliminated the deficit, and wrested control of government-owned enterprises from the old proporz system, which for 50 years had divided plum public-sector jobs between socialist and conservative party loyalists.

Haider still pulled some strings from Carinthia, but the low-key Freedom Party Vice Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer won acceptance as a surprisingly moderate voice in international affairs. Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, 33, tamed the budget. Their achievements, says Sichrovsky, made Haider restless and resentful. He sought support in unlikely places, visiting Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He also rallied hard-liners within his party to press for purist policies, from opposition to E.U. enlargement to insistence on tax cuts. It was this last drive, in the face of efforts by his own ministers to raise money for catastrophic flood damage, that finally forced Riess-Passer, Grasser and other Freedomite officials to quit.

Haider has often spoken of forming a Europe-wide movement that would, among other things, attempt to block E.U. enlargement. If his performance over the past couple of years is anything to go by, proponents of the enlargement process must be hoping that he leads the charge against them. He could turn out to be their secret weapon.