Corruption scandal deals blow to maverick right-winger

Date: 18/06/1998

By Thomas Klau

FOR many years, Austria's mainstream politicians have been acting under the menace of a highly articulate political maverick with pleasant looks, strong popular appeal and a frightening history of flirtation with Austria's Nazi past.

Until recently, Jörg Haider, the youthful leader of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) - a party which lost its liberal credentials after Haider took over the leadership - seemed poised to lead his troops from strength to strength. Many observers credited the FPÖ with a sporting chance of establishing itself as the country's second-largest party in next year's national parliamentary elections.

But in the last few weeks, a financial scandal of unprecedented magnitude has engulfed the FPÖ leadership, delivering a potentially fatal blow to a party which had built much of its electoral appeal on its supposed aloofness from the corruption and nepotism it ascribed to the Socialist Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ) and the Österreichische Volkspartei (ÖVP).

Senior FPÖ officials have resigned from office or been taken into custody, while the former FPÖ parliamentarian Peter Rosenstingl, the man at the centre of the affair, has escaped abroad and is rumoured to be in Moscow.

Rosenstingl is suspected of having been the linchpin of a complex network of embezzlement which led to the disappearance of party and public moneys amounting to about 50 million ecu.

The scandal recently prompted the FPÖ's most senior elected official, Karl-Heinz Grasser, the deputy Landeshauptmann (governor) of Carinthia, to step down from all his political duties, amidst damaging criticism of Haider's entourage and other members of the party leadership.

While Haider's position as FPÖ leader does not seem threatened, repeated allegations that the party's top leadership has known about the scandal since last November might well, in the public mind, have demolished his image as the Mr Clean of Austrian politics.

Such, at least, is the hope of SPÖ Chancellor Viktor Klima and ÖVP Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schüssel, whose prospects of defending their parties' position as the country's biggest vote-getters should have been substantially improved by the FPÖ's woes.

During the last national elections, to the European Parliament, in October 1996 the ÖVP emerged as the biggest party with 29.7&percent; of the vote, with the SPÖ coming a close second with 29.1&percent;. But the FPÖ garnered an impressive 27.5&percent;: 5.4 percentage points more than in the previous national elections in 1995.

Whereas Haider - a man who has praised Nazi Germany's employment policies and has shown sympathy for Nazi officials - is often perceived abroad as Austria's answer to France's National Front leader Jean-Marie le Pen, even Austrians with no sympathies for far-right policies are keen to defend the FPÖ leader against the accusation of being the telegenic face of modern-day fascism.

Austrian commentators explain Haider's success as a consequence of the consensus-oriented cross-party tradition of Austrian politics. In the post-war decades, this ethos has often led Socialists and Conservatives to agree less-than-transparent deals and share out plum jobs in Austria's formerly large public enterprise sector.

The management of the country's economy and politics has frequently been settled by discussion-stifling cross-party agreement (a recent exception was the SPÖ-ÖVP debate about the preservation of Austria's neutrality). Many welcomed Haider as a breath of fresh air in a political culture controlled by a party duopoly determined to avoid vigorous debate.

As was the case with Italy's post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale, the perceived collusion of the political establishment drove many voters to support, and numerous commentators to tolerate, the emergence of a right-wing maverick with no respect for the sacred cows of Austrian politics.

Yet the scandal now engulfing the FPÖ might well have delivered a fatal blow to Haider's long-term ambition to participate in Austria's national government.

The darkening of the FPÖ's electoral prospects should end all speculation about a possible ÖVP-FPÖ alliance at national level, and further boost the already strong chances of a continuation of the Conservatives' grand coalition with the Social Democrats beyond the 1999 elections.

It is almost certainly too soon to write off the FPÖ as a spent force in Austrian politics. Too many Austrians are likely to continue to sympathise with Haider's attacks on the dominance of the mainstream parties, and too many on the losing side in the economic race continue to see in him their best advocate against the twin onslaughts of European integration and economic globalisation.

Yet a growing number of Austrians are coming to terms with EU membership, as was shown by the comparatively paltry 200,000 voters who supported an FPÖ-launched referendum against the single currency last year. The financial scandal which has engulfed Haider's troops should give Austria's mainstream parties the pleasant feeling that, for the foreseeable future at least, their position at the state's helm is safe.