Things are bad, but not that bad. There are two reasons for Haider’s success. The first is the man himself. He has considerable charisma and is a magnetic television performer; a sort of diabolical, Alpine replica of Britain’s Tony Blair. And he has unusual skill at turning political opportunity to personal advantage. Which brings us to the second reason for his rise. The Freedom Party got 27 percent of the vote in the recent Austrian elections, making it the second largest party in the country. Its supporters can be divided into two groups: welfare chauvinists and resentful outsiders.
The former–mostly young, male and low-skilled–are worried at the prospect of any reduction in Austria’s generous system of social benefits and blame “foreigners” for its high cost. They would like to see an end to immigration and a closing of Austria’s borders. The “outsiders” are provincial farmers and small businessmen protesting against the tidy arrangement whereby the country’s two mainstream parties–the Socialists and the conservative People’s Party–have carved up the economy, jobs, perks and power between themselves for the past 40 years. Haider has brilliantly manipulated both issues: we’ll keep out or expel the foreigners, he promises, and we’ll clean up the cozy, corrupt mess in Vienna.
The welfare issue is mostly mythical. Until recently Austria was indeed very hospitable to refugees (especially from the neighboring Balkans); however, these people represent little strain on the country’s social services, and anyway Austria is one of the most prosperous countries in the world. But the old party system is a real target: the comfortable, back-scratching coalitions that have governed Austria for much of the postwar era resemble those of Italy, Belgium and other West European states. Corruption and clientelism are endemic in such systems, and what is now happening in Austria echoes the unraveling of parties and coalitions that we have seen elsewhere. In each case it is men and parties outside the system, promising to clean things up and restore open democracy, who have swept in on a wave of electoral revulsion.
The difference in Austria, of course, is Haider himself–and the country’s unsavory past. Haider is not a pleasant individual. He comes from a solid Nazi family; he has on occasion “misspoken” in admiration of Hitler’s economic programs and the “decency” and “honor” of SS veterans; his natural instinct is to downplay Nazi crimes–he once described concentration camps as “punishment camps.” And the atmosphere at his public meetings is distasteful and frightening, full of pent-up hostility to outsiders and minorities.
In Austria this conjures up terrifying ghosts–the more so because, unlike Germans, Austrians have never fully acknowledged their Nazi past, preferring to see their country as an idyllic Alpine republic that was once a helpless victim of Nazi occupation. Haider treads a careful line here: he almost never invokes the Nazi era, nor does he spend time condemning it. Instead he emphasizes the “good fortune” of his own “late birth” (1950), as though the Nazi predilections of older Austrians were the unfortunate but unavoidable price for being born a generation earlier. And Haider encourages Austrians to feel pride in their nation and to resent “outside” demands that they scrutinize their history and apologize for it.
In this context, the European furor over a governing coalition including Haider’s party (though not Haider himself) may make things worse. Many Austrians who dislike Haider also resent being told what government they should have. If the new Austrian coalition falls, there will be another election; and on present indications Haider would increase his showing dramatically, thanks to the foreign threats.
Austria is a small, stable and unimportant country. Jorg Haider is not Adolf Hitler. His rise is a byproduct of Austria’s overdue transition out of its postwar system of “organized” democracy into something more genuinely open and competitive. But if we make a victim of Haider and his country, the man and his rhetoric could well find sympathetic echoes in other countries, as a symbol of widespread resentment by “us” against “them.” We would do better instead to take a deep breath and recall the wisdom of old Dr. Marx: great events and personalities in world history do reappear in one fashion or another–the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
