Will Schüssel say tschüss to Haider?

Will Austrian voters in the 1 October general elections say "auf Wiedersehen" to their perma-tanned political Frankenstein, Jörg Haider?

His disappearance from the scene would bring a smile to the faces of politicians and diplomats who had to endure the odium, in 2000, of 14 other member states imposing sanctions after Haider’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the centrist People’s Party (ÖVP) went into coalition together.

Since then the FPÖ has torn itself in two, Haider’s (smaller) share now styling itself Alliance for Austria’s Future (BZÖ), and set to fall below the 4% hurdle next week. If it survives, it will be broken-backed, its power-base essentially Carinthia, where the 56-year-old Haider is a deliriously popular (and remarkably effective) Landeshauptmann (governor).

This splinter party will certainly not have enough parliamentarians to form a fresh coalition with the 60-year-old ÖVP Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, who looks set to triumph next week - though it could be closer than the two or three points margin over the Socialists (SPÖ) the polls have been predicting.

Then again the SPÖ is in terrible trouble. Its leader Alfred Gusenbauer has narrowly survived damaging revelations that the BAWAG bank, run by the now bankrupt trade union movement - and in effect the party bank - blew €1 billion in high-risk speculations in the Caribbean.

Schüssel has already ruled out working with Haider’s successor as FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache. The Greens, on 10%, are hopeful of coming in third after the SPÖ.

So is a Black-Green coalition with Green leader Alexander Van der Bellen, 62, in prospect? It would be a first in Europe, and delight Christian Democratic elements in the European People’s Party, which in 2000 urged a deal with the Greens rather than Haider. But the Greens have a pricy shopping list. It includes cancelling a huge fighter-plane contract as well as student contributions to their fees.

The alternative many dread is another ‘Black-Red’, ÖVP and SPÖ, coalition - what Austria had for most of the post-war period.

Such a grand coalition would probably encourage the far right to flare up again. During the 1987-2000 Red-Black coalition Haider’s FPÖ became the second-largest, with half the working-class vote.

Europe as an issue is not really present in these elections, except as an all-purpose insult. In the 1994 referendum 67% of Austrians voted ‘Yes’ to join the EU. Today they are as grumpy as it gets. A Eurobarometer poll in May found that only 31% thought membership was a good thing and 33% the opposite.

Why? One reason is that Schüssel has been ambiguous or faint-hearted when it comes to arguing the corner for the EU. Euroscepticism has become normal, one symptom of it the rise of the quarrelsome show-off independent MEP Hans-Peter Martin. He is now trying to get into the Austrian parliament with a new ‘clean hands’ party. His anti-European tirades are pure Haider.

More than anything this is an ‘us-alone’ election, as European elections increasingly are. There is a noticeable absence of EU leaders jetting in to endorse anyone: these foreigners are not wanted on board either.

Is Austria’s pervasive ‘Eurofrustration’ more than Europeans’ routine, ignorant grumbling? There are pinpricks from ‘Europe’ like the European Court of Justice’s decision to stop Austrian universities from restricting entry for less able students from abroad. (The result has been an influx of mediocre German would-be medics, especially in Graz and Innsbruck, clogging up the universities.)

The refusal to prolong beyond 2003 the transit agreement on (all of the EU’s) north-south traffic through Austria has provoked ill-feeling and caused continuing environmental damage. And there is lingering resentment about the sanctions imposed in 2000.

Although Austrian banks and other businesses have spread like wildfire into Hungary, Slovakia and the rest of middle Europe, presumably to good effect back home, EU membership is generally held - including by many non-combatant experts - to have been less than a success economically.

During the referendum campaign in 1994 it had been predicted that membership would create 2% growth and another 30,000 jobs. According to a recent weighty study by the Chamber of Labour, meeting the Maastricht criteria, inter alia, in fact caused gross domestic product to contract slightly after 1995; and unemployment now stands at a record 370,000, or 5.2% of the labour force.

As elsewhere, the pro-Europeans have left it much too late to make their case. Their silence now is unheroic, but no great surprise.

Will Austrian voters in the 1 October general elections say "auf Wiedersehen" to their perma-tanned political Frankenstein, Jörg Haider?

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