The rest of Europe was still grumbling about Haider last week as his party officially joined the government and demonstrators still filled the streets of Vienna, Salzburg and other Austrian cities. But in Carinthia, Haider’s stronghold in the mountainous southeastern corner of Austria, many citizens couldn’t be prouder of the local boy made good. From Klagenfurt coffee houses to Alpine villages tucked beneath snowy peaks along the Slovenian border, the Freedom Party’s rise to power in Vienna is the talk of the moment, and local experts say the party now commands near-majority support in the province. “They’re equating Haider with Hitler and it’s making people defensive,” says Klaus Pekarek, director of Carinthia’s largest bank, who doubts the province will feel any economic sting from the EU’s sanctions against Austria. Haider’s high popularity here has been clearly helped by his decision to stay in his job as governor, as promised, until his term runs out in 2004. But it’s also a product of Carinthia itself, an Alpine sanctuary where aging Nazi war criminals and high-tech entrepreneurs dwell side by side, where strains of Germanic nationalism, anti-immigration rhetoric and a sporty, vigorous image all strike powerful chords with the populace. Says Matthus Grilc, a Klagenfurt attorney and a longtime leader of the Slovenian-speaking minority: “Haider couldn’t have built this career anywhere else in Austria.”
Carinthia has always been a world apart. Nestled between 7,000-foot mountain ranges, just north of the Italian and Slovenian borders, the province has long been marked by intense xenophobia and German nationalism. Yugoslav troops overran the province in the months after World War I, claiming the land belonged to the Slavs; and Tito’s partisans occupied a chunk of territory in the last days of World War II. The invasions whipped up animosity toward the province’s small Slovenian-speaking minority–today they number about 14,000–and the suspicion lingers to this day. A German nationalist group known as the Abwehrkmpfer still vocally celebrates a 1920 referendum that awarded the disputed portion of Carinthia back to Austria.
Haider, who was born in northern Austria, arrived in Carinthia in 1976, fresh out of law school in Vienna. He settled in Klagenfurt, a picturesque town of 100,000 people set between the Alps and a resort lake known as the Worthersee, then briefly worked for a company that built resort hotels in Carinthia. But the political climate was just right for a young up-and-comer with a soft spot for Austria’s Nazi heritage. Carinthia was the private fiefdom of Gov. Leopold Wagner, a charismatic populist and former high-ranking member of Hitler Youth. Wagner fraternized with ex-Nazis, reportedly hired many and railed against the Slovenian minority–banning them from government jobs, attacking a university professor who dared to criticize the Abwehrkmpfer. Haider became Wagner’s protege. “Wagner saw him as ‘my boy’,” says Gerhard Seifreid, a Carinthia mayor who has known Haider for decades.
Haider turned against his mentor. By 1989 he had risen from a low ranking Freedom Party official to the leader of the fast-growing right-wing movement. That year he challenged Wagner for the governorship, attacking the Social Democrats as an ossified party that had dominated Carinthia’s government for too long. Haider won 29 percent of the province’s vote–enough to patch together a coalition in Parliament that named him governor. While campaigning for change, he also kept up his ties to his ex-Nazi constituency. In October 1990 he traveled to the top of Ulrichsberg, a mountain peak just outside of Klagenfurt, to fraternize with German Army veterans at an annual remembrance day. Many of the vets were members of the Kameradschaft IV, a neo-Nazi group made up exclusively of former members of the Waffen SS, Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers. Haider told them, memorably, that Nazi-era soldiers were “not villains, but victims.” But two years later Haider’s open Nazi sympathies proved his undoing. In a speech before the provincial assembly in Klagenfurt, he compared local employment policies unfavorably with those of Hitler’s Third Reich. The remark created an uproar. The Social Democrats joined with other parties to vote him out of office. Haider’s expulsion touched off demonstrations and bomb threats by Haider’s far-right supporters.
Haider has since reinvented himself. In a comeback that was the talk of Austria, he won the Carinthia governorship in 1999 with a sporty image and a populist message. He attracted many of the province’s young voters, while still drawing in right-wingers and old German nationalists. As governor, Haider has been an attack dog: he’s criticized local government subsidies to Slovenian cultural programs and refused to accept the annual quota of immigrants to his province, defying the national minister in Vienna. Last year Haider vilified Cornelius Kolig, a Carinthian collage artist commissioned to decorate the halls of the Parliament in Klagenfurt, calling his work “degenerate.” The attacks polarized Carinthians–but they also brought the Freedom Party a higher profile. Still, Haider knows just how far he can go: the old Nazis still meet at the top of Ulrichsberg every October, but Haider hasn’t greeted them there for a decade.
Today Klagenfurt seems virtually untouched by the commotion in Vienna and the rest of Europe. Tourists amble past its immaculate Hapsburg-era public plazas, leafy canals and Baroque-domed Roman Catholic churches, framed by snow-covered Alpine peaks. “It’s business as usual,” says banker Pekarek. The Social Democrats, demoralized and in disarray, are struggling to find a new message. Trying to whip up resentments over the province’s international stigma, Social Democrat activists in Klagenfurt are distributing fliers with the legend “Carinthia is not Haiderland.” But increasingly, it seems to be just that.
