Austria Puts out Its Firebrand

Ein Streitgespräch mit Jörg Haider
(A Dispute with Jörg Haider)
By Alfred Worm
208 pages, Vienna: Ueberreuter, 2005
(in German)

Jörg Haider is the portrait of a successful far-right European politician. Telegenic, nationalistic, Euroskeptical, and, some say, anti-Semitic, the controversial Austrian is, above all, a political opportunist. He is pro-welfare with the poor, a free-marketer with the business lobby, anti-establishment with the young, and grateful when he meets a member of an older generation. And, when he is with SS veterans, Haider is full of compliments for the honor of the special Nazi police.

Despite his attempts to appeal to everyone, Haider is an extremely polarizing politician. Some make a hero out of him, a populist knight in shining armor, fighting the double standards of political correctness while declaring war on elitist, exclusive cartels. Others tend to characterize his political heritage, the Austrian Freedom Party that he successfully led in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the offspring of disgruntled, former high-ranking Austrian Nazis. For the first group, claims of Nazi sympathies are unfair because of Haider’s year of birth, 1950. The latter group points out that Haider in some cases intentionally uses language reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric, as when he spoke of the Nazi regime’s "orderly employment policies," or when he used the term "punishment camp" to describe the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Austrian journalist Alfred Worm is firmly in the second camp. One of Haider’s harshest critics, Worm has fought Haider from the beginning of his political career, using the weapon of the media first in the magazine Profil, and later in the weekly News. Worm has been especially critical of the Austrian judiciary, which protected Haider from being criticized for pro-Nazi statements.

Which is why Worm’s newest book, Ein Streitgespräch mit Jörg Haider (A Dispute with Jörg Haider) comes as a surprise. In more than 200 pages, Worm asks the questions — and Haider gives the answers. And there is not much of a dispute. The book is much more Haider’s than Worm’s. As all the answers are edited by Haider, the book becomes his tool. This time, he is respectable with the respected.

It is not that Worm doesn’t try to ask the right questions. It’s that Haider avoids any outspoken answers. He is elusive on the impact of Hitler and the Nazis on the creation of the Freedom Party and of his own political persona. When discussing the pan-German movement in Austria, Haider’s own ideological and personal background, he fails to hold it responsible for the Nazis. Instead, he claims the movement was a casualty of Hitler’s policies (what a surprise in a country where everybody claims to be a victim). All the intimate aspects of his family’s checkered history — his parents’ ardent activism in the Nazi Party, his father’s fighting against Austrian independence — have been white-washed through careful editing. Haider characterizes his father as "good-natured," a Nazi only because of the "situation." And Worm does little to challenge this idyllic picture.

Haider is much less elusive when it comes to contemporary politics. Not surprising, he is critical of U.S. President George W. Bush. He deplores Bush’s religious language and sees the Iraq war as based on "lies and deception." The United States creates "discord worldwide," he claims, its policies "disastrous for the Near and Middle East, as the Iraq war has demonstrated."

This is not just part of the average European critique of dangerous U.S. unilateralism. Rather, his complaint is that Americans are "without history." By repeating one of the most prominent anti-American clichés, Haider makes clear where his resentment comes from: He represents a brand of European arrogance based on a specific interpretation of history. Old Europe has more history than does America. Years of war and turmoil on European soil have made the continent wise in a way Americans simply can’t understand.

Haider’s personal relationship with the United States is defined by his unfulfilled love for that nation. Although he plays the popular anti–American card these days, Haider, ever the political chameleon, was once known to delight in his photos with such American symbols as the California flag and Harvard Yard. In 1994, he even transformed Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich’s idea of a "Contract with America" into a 20-point "Contract with Austria," pledging to cut taxes and restrict immigration. But, at some point in the second half of the 1990s, Haider had to accept that he would never overcome his image of a neo-Nazi hooligan, of a xenophobic rabble-rouser. Beginning in 2001, he also seemed to understand clearly that the European (and therefore Austrian) mood could be more easily exploited by anti-American gestures than by pro-American sentiments. What is more surprising about the book, though, is not Haider’s attempts to portray his record in a positive light, but Worm’s willingness to provide a platform through which Haider can spread his propaganda. The book likely signals the end of Alfred Worm’s history as an ardent anti-Haider activist. He still claims to be very critical of Haider. But the credibility of Worm’s professional reputation is damaged. After all, he has presented Haider with a unique opportunity to mainstream his image. Haider couldn’t have imagined a better opportunity.

But the book also signals the end — rather, the beginning of the end — of Jörg Haider, the exceptional personality. Haider’s portrayal of himself (with contributions from Worm) is not much of a provocation. The respectable Haider, though, is just boring. When he cannot provoke, he is easily forgotten. When he is no longer hated, he will not be loved by great numbers, either. He has become a formerly charismatic leader in search of his lost charisma.

Perhaps, then, that was Worm’s agenda all along: to draw a picture of an impotent politician who has lost the ability to at once charm and terrorize. Worm successfully demonstrates that Haider has become a person who is no longer an enigma, a rumbling politician from the Austrian backwoods. No longer the controversial figure whose extremist party captured 27 percent of the vote in 1999’s general election, Haider clings to his position of governor of Carinthia, the only among Austria’s nine provinces that still provides him and his party with a strong following. When he attacks his former coalition partner, the conservative chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, Schüssel brushes him off. When he attempts to flirt with the left, he is — at least outside Carinthia — ignored once more.

Haider’s mélange of populism, anti-immigration xenophobia, and Nazi code words has lost the appeal it once had. It does not mean that he has no future; he will still have some influence in Austrian politics, but he is the kingmaker no more. His success will have an impact on some would-be Haiders, but Haider himself is already much more history than future. His latest turnaround — the foundation of a new party, the Alliance for Austria’s Future, in cooperation with most of the Freedom Party’s leadership — seems to be a charade whose only purpose is to hide his decline. If that was Worm’s intention, he has succeeded. A Dispute with Jörg Haider is a conversation with a chameleon who is finally blending in with his surroundings.