He is short, balding and middleaged.
He has a wife and six children and lives in a sprawling suburban house outside Munich. He is a lecturer and journalist who wrote his doctoral thesis in social science on agriculture in the Tyrol. But when the way was legally cleared for his return to his homeland for the first time in 44 years, Austria's long-established coalition government trembled last week. For the mustached Herr Doktor is Franz Joseph Otto Ruprecht Maria Anton Karl Maximilian Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignaz, Archduke Otto von Habsburg, pretender to the Austrian throne.
Socialist leaders called Otto's projected return a "provocation" that threatened Austria's precarious neutral position as a buffer between East and West.
Electrical workers went on a wildcat strike, plunging one Vienna district into darkness. Left-wing papers roared against "foreign and domestic reactionaries," and Socialist political bosses threatened to pull out of their coalition with the conservative People's Party.
Industrious Ants. Otto was five when Austria rebelled against the Habsburg monarchy and overthrew his father, Emperor Karl, in the aftermath of World War I. The new republican government exiled the royal family and passed a "Habsburg Law," which banned their return to Austrian soil until they renounced all claims to the throne and formally embraced the democratic constitution. Karl regally refused, and after his death in 1922 the royal family settled in Spain, where the Empress Zita set up a modest court.
Zita insisted that Otto be accorded the full privileges of his rank, rose and curtsied when he entered a room, and called him "Your Imperial Highness." A thoughtful, scholarly youth, Otto studied at Belgium's Louvain University, by his serious demeanor stood off phalanxes of eligible European princesses. When one young, attractive Hungarian countess came to pay homage, Otto strolled silently with her for some minutes in his garden until he suddenly asked: "Have you ever thought how industrious ants are?"
Finally in 1951, at 38, he married Germany's Princess Regina of Saxe-Meiningen. Settling outside Munich in the village of Pocking, Otto traveled often to Spain, where he was honorary president of the Franco-backed European Documentation and Information Center, an organization founded in 1952 to bring politically isolated Spain into closer relations with the rest of Europe. His membership in this society and his friendship with Franco convinced Austrian Socialists that his ultimate aim was the re-establishment of an auto cratic monarchy in Austria.