NEWS ANALYSIS The world worries as Austria turns rightward after elections

BUDAPEST, Oct. 5 (JTA) – Sharp electoral gains by Austria’s far-right Freedom Party have sounded alarm bells far beyond Austria’s borders and made controversial party leader Jorg Haider a key player in national and international politics. The Freedom Party surged to second place in Sunday’s general election, riding a law-and-order, anti-immigrant platform that also criticized Austria’s membership in the European Union and promised to change a stagnant political system. It captured just over 27 percent of the vote, up more than 5 percent over the last elections in 1995 and the best showing by a far-right party in Europe since the end of World War II. The Social Democrats remained the largest party, but dropped to 33.4 percent from 38 percent in 1995. The Freedom Party stood just 14,000 votes ahead of the conservative People’s Party, which won 26.9 percent, slightly down from 28 percent in 1995. The final results won’t be known until 200,000 absentee ballots are counted. As Austrian politicians begin the difficult process of forming a new government, the gains put the 49-year-old Haider, the son of Nazi supporters who is notorious for his past praise of the Hitler regime, into the position of potential kingmaker. Meeting reporters on Tuesday, after the outgoing coalition of Social Democrats and the Peoples Party formally resigned, Haider clearly claimed his party’s right to a prominent role. “We are ready to work, we are ready for government, we are ready to take on responsibility,” he declared. Other right-wing parties across Europe exulted at Haider success. But the Freedom Party gains drew outraged headlines and worried editorials evoking the specter of Hitler. Jewish representatives and political figures warned against the consequences. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was one of the most outspoken. A statement from his office expressed “serious concern” at Haider’s success. “The rise of the extreme right must set off alarm bells among all the people of the free world who still recall the horrors of the Second World War,” it said. Barak “called on all enlightened forces in the world to band together in a common effort to block the spread of the neo-Nazi and fascist plague.” Similarly, Andreas Nachama, the influential president of the Jewish community of Berlin, called Haider’s success “a horrible blow against European unification, against tolerance in Europe, against everything that has been achieved in Austria in the last 10 years. “I am worried about the influence it might have on Europe, on all the surrounding countries,” he told JTA. “It is the wrong sign in the wrong place.” Nonetheless, political commentators in Austria, as well as exit poll interviews, indicated that Haider’s success represent more a deep-seated desire by Austrians for political change than a ringing endorsement of xenophobia or neo-Nazism. Austria has been ruled for decades by the Social Democrats or the Peoples Party. For the past 13 years, these two parties have ruled together in a “grand coalition.” Disaffected voters, fed up with what they see as political stagnation, have been gradually deserting the two big parties for years, turning to the Freedom Party on the right and the smaller Green Party on the left. Indeed, the Greens also surged forward Sunday, winning 7.1 percent – a major increase from 4.8 percent last time. Green Party leader Alexander van der Bellen on Tuesday slammed international media coverage of the election as “hysterical.” “Austria was not a Nazi country before the election and has not become one since,” he said. An exit poll of 2,200 voters carried out by Vienna’s Center for Applied Political Research indicated that 47 percent of Freedom Party voters said they backed Haider because of his anti-foreigner policies. But 65 percent said wanted the party to expose scandal and misbehavior in government, and 63 percent just wanted change. “Haider was relentless in calling for change,” said Edward Serotta, director of the Vienna-based Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation. “So much so that I think many voters saw him as less of a threat than the establishment that has been in power for so long.” Haider pounded this home again on Tuesday. “Sunday’s election result was not an ideological swing to the right in any way,” he said. “It was a swing to justice, which means Austrian voters have a chance that more attention will be paid to their interests.” Austria, he said, “will get an open, liberal and tolerant political system in which change is something natural.” But Haider’s campaign also played on people’s fears that immigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere would inundate the country and take their jobs. He called for “Austria First” and “Austria for the Austrians.” Shimon Samuels, European director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the danger rests in the fact that the mainstream has embraced Haider’s message. “In contradistinction to Germany, where extreme right voters are predominantly young, frustrated, unemployed people from former East Germany, the Austrian voters for Haider are mainly from the middle class, living in a comparatively prosperous and crime-free society,” he told JTA. “Their xenophobia is inbred and based upon their fear of modernity. Perhaps Austria was prematurely welcomed into the European Union,” he said. Sunday’s elections left Austria, for the first time since World War II, with three main parties at about the same strength. Whatever role the Freedom Party plays in the coming Parliament, it is clear that Haider has broken the postwar political mold. “Haider had one short-term and one long-term goal,” said Marta Halpert, director of the European Office of the Anti-Defamation League. “The first was to break up the ‘monopoly’ on power held by the current grand coalition, the Social Democrats and People’s Party, which have shared power for roughly 50 years. “His foremost ambition – to become chancellor of Austria – is still up in the air.”