On October 3 1999, the results were announced of Austria's general election. Many Austrians were shocked to discover that Jorg Haider's Freedom Party (FPÖ) had won over one million votes, or 27.6 per cent of the electorate, placing it within touching distance of power. Format magazine spoke in despair against the complacency of the country's political elites. Outside Austria, liberal newspapers have responded with confusion and shock. 'Austria thrown into turmoil', said the Guardian. 'Austrian political landscape turned upside down', claimed Le Monde. Taking its cue from the fears of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), the Financial Times asked whether the inexorable rise of Haider's Freedom Party would take Austria outside of the mainstream of European politics. Yet the most significant consequences will be felt in Austria. The country's chancellor has been forced to resign, and many people, socialists and anti-racists, wait anxiously to see if Jorg Haider's party can be stopped.
Perhaps more than any other far-right party in Europe, the Freedom Party traces its lineage directly to the fascist organisations of the inter-war years. Its telegenic leader, Jorg Haider, is the son of Nazi parents. His father joined the Hitler Youth as early as 1929, and was later a local player in setting up post-war fascist organisations. Prior to Haider's taking over the leadership of the FPÖ in 1986, it was a small and crude national socialist organisation. Since then, Haider has carefully brought the organisation into the electoral mainstream. Yet in a pattern familiar across Europe, Haider has alternately raised his party's fascist heritage and then disowned it. Publicly distancing himself from the party's past one week, he has gone out of his way to claim the fascist mantle the next.
In 1985, Haider described Walter Reder, a convicted mass murderer and war criminal, as 'a prisoner of war'. Five years later, he praised the role of the SS in wartime as a 'a struggle for freedom and democracy in Europe'. In 1995, Haider spoke to an assembly organised by SS veterans, describing them as 'decent people ... people of character who have the courage of their convictions.' As recently as last year, Jorg Haider compared the treatment of the Sudeten Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, 'I do not want to judge what was more terrible ... one cannot treat equal happenings differently.' Such statements are routine among Haider's entourage. They are designed to a convert FPÖ identifiers over time into hard and determined racists. New Labour in Britain has less historical continuity with social democracy, less loyalty to the tradition, than Haider has with fascism.
Inside Austria, Haider is often presented as a demagogue and an opportunist, but rarely as a fascist. He is a often described as a one-issue anti-immigration campaigner, not a Nazi. This absence of categorisation neglects the similarities between the FPÖ and the inter-war fascist parties in Italy and Germany and elsewhere. First of all, there is an ideological continuity. Members of Haider's immediate entourage, such as Andreas Mölzer, Haider's adviser for cultural affairs, engage in open anti-semitism. Mölzer's Zur Zeit has revived claims that Jews are responsible for the ritual murder of gentile children. It describes Nuremberg as 'the biggest show trial in history'. Pan-German nationalism and Holocaust revisionism are a significant part of the FPÖ's appeal. Second, there is also a strategic continuity between the Freedom Party and historic fascism. Both are radical movements, with significant extra-parliamentary support. Unlike the 1930s, this is not an era for large private armies, but the skinhead militias and racist attacks are there.
It is distressing to learn that more Austrian workers now vote for the FPÖ than the SPÖ. It seems that Haider's party combines (like the French Front National, or FN) a petit-bourgeois cadre with a proletarian vote. Yet perhaps one area in which the Freedom Party is different from Hitler's NSDAP or Mussolini's PNZ, is that the Austrian party's rhetoric combines chauvinism with free-market economics. Haider's election pledges included privatisation, tax breaks for businesses and a flat rate income tax of 23 per cent. Meanwhile, the party's leading candidate in the recent elections was a prominent industrialist, Thomas Prinzhorn. Anti-labour, pro-business, the FPÖ's strongest votes have tended to come from regions dependent on tourism and service. If Haider's vote has now spread, then it would follow that the potential threat of his movement has grown significantly.
Asked in opinion polls, 65 per cent claimed to have gone for the FPÖ as a protest vote. This has led some commentators to play down the political significance of the result. In the face of this vote, indifference would be a mistake. The party's first breakthrough was achieved in 1986, on the back of protest votes. The voters may have changed, but the size of the party's core vote has increased dramatically. Meanwhile, Austria has also become a more racist place. Twenty-two per cent of Austrians believe that 'no Jews should live in Austria', 37 per cent that 'Jews are too influential'. Haider's fascist politics are now better known and understood across Austria. In 1991, Haider eulogised 'the correct labour policy of the Third Reich'. After this speech, the Austrian Conservative ÖVP dropped its local alliance for Haider, and he was forced out of his position as Governor of Carinthia. This April, however, Haider was able to return to the governorship, this time secure with a majority of the local vote. For most Austrian voters, familiarity with the FPÖ has bred acceptance, respectability, and not contempt.
Why has the far-right achieved this breakthrough in Austria? According to Karl Pfeifer of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, one long-term factor has been the relative ease with which Austria survived the traumas of 1945. A majority of Austrians supported the Anschluss with Germany in 1938, six hundred thousand joined the Nazi party, and huge numbers served in the Wehrmacht. However, postwar Austrian politicians described their country as the first victim of Hitler's march east. While ordinary Germans have been compelled to come to terms with their country's role in the Holocaust, ordinary Austrians have been separated from this guilt. Recently mass circulation dailies like Neue Kronenzeitung have opened their pages to Holocaust revisionists. Fascism has a dangerous and horrible place in the mind of the German public, while in Austria the feeling is more muted.
More recently, Austria has been ruled for thirteen years by a government consisting of the centre-left SPÖ and the centre-right ÖVP. Some of the blame for Haider's success must fall on the politics of "Die Neue Mitte", the Third Way. Both in Germany and Austria right-wing social democrats have experienced their worst poll results since the war. Voters have already rejected conservatism, they have had enough of pro-market policies.
Elsewhere in Europe, the 1980s were years of conservative dominance. Following the economic downturn of the 1990s, voters have turned to the left. In Italy, Britain and France we now see social democratic governments. Yet in Austria, the SPÖ is part of the problem, and there is a need for change. Threatened by the rise of Haider, the social democrats have implemented tougher anti-immigration laws, sending out a clear signal that Haider's party is correct, and foreigners are to blame. In the absence of the socialists, opposition to Haider has come from smaller groups, the Greens (well-represented in the Austrian parliament), the Communists, the Young Socialists and the small socialist party Linkswende (whose members are currently fighting off a libel case from the Freedom Party). This opposition deserves our encouragement and support.
Finally, what does Haider's vote tell us about the prospects for the far right acrosss Europe? Before the 1980s, such parties were an irrelevance in European politics. Yet following the French FN's success in the 1984 European elections, a window of opportunity was opened across the continent. In the early 1990s, far-right parties grew in France, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe. Few of these parties challenged for power, but everywhere they had the effect of pulling the political consensus to the right. By the mid-1990s, this process seemed to have reversed. In every country, the far-right was on the retreat. In the key case of France, Le Pen was marginalised by the success of the 1995 public sector strikes. In a moment of popular anti-racism, the Front National found its meetings disrupted and its growth checked. The organisation split last year and has since been in decline.
It is far too early to say whether Haider's success will give the European far-right a boost comparable to Le Pen's victory in 1984. That will depend on events in Austria and elsewhere. One success for fascism does not yet make a tragedy for the rest of us. It would be ludicrous for socialists to construct in our heads a mental map of Europe with Austria painted black. Even now, the appropriate response remains vigilance rather than mobilisation. Yet one lesson should be learned. Opposition to the far-right remains an issue of present politics, and not simply a question of the past.
