Joerg Haider in historical perspective
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 12:38:04 +0100
From: Tobias Vogel <tobias.vogel@irc-bosna.org>
Ian Reifowitz asks with regard to the Austrian Freedom
Party, "From where does support for this party derive? To what degree is it a legacy
of National Socialism as opposed to merely a response to the increased immigration of the
last decade?" While I find Haider's anti-immigrant stance more than a little
disturbing, I agree very much with William Pfaff's op-ed piece in the International
Herald Tribune of 5 February claiming that the stifling Proporz-System according to
which all public
jobs as well as a great deal of private ones were distributed along party lines is one of
the major factors in Haider's success. Opposition to the Social Democratic and
Conservative stranglehold on politics was bound to arise, and Haider managed to unite both
conservative xenophobes and a new class of high achievers who hate the old system. I have
no doubts that there are a fair number of unreconstructed Nazi-sympathizers among the
first group, but I do not believe that Haider's party could be fairly characterized as
fascist. And very much like the Front National in France, it seems that the traditional
parties bear a heavy responsibility for his success. I do not believe that there is
anything essentially Austrian about this, and I would in particular see parallels to smart
(and therefore dangerous) populist types such as Christoph Blocher in Switzerland and
Gianfranco Fini in Italy. I also don't see these parties as a direct response to
immigration; rather, they use xenophobia as a unifying ideology around which they organize
their rather disparate programmatic components.
TOBIAS K VOGEL
Research Associate,
International Center for Migration,
Ethnicity and Citizenship
New York and Sarajevo
<tobias.vogel@irc-bosna.org>