Haider's legacy?

Austria woke up to the news this morning that Carinthia’s Governor, Jörg Haider was killed in a car accident while driving home during the early hours of this morning. With the country’s political parties attempting to form a new government in Vienna just less than two weeks after an earth-shattering election result, which left the two far right-wing parties (Haider was the leader of one of them) a major political force, the short-term political consequences are significant. In the long-term it is significant too.

While the obituaries will focus on his notorious 1991 comments approving of National Socialist employment policies, and on the European Union’s misguided attempts to isolate Austria when his FPÖ entered the federal government in 2000, there are other aspects of his legacy that are well worth considering. In a book published earlier this year, the political scientists Anton Pelinka, Hubert Sickinger and Karin Stögner (by no means friends of Haider), have made the case for his role in transforming not only Austrian politics but its political culture. The point could be extended to Europe as a whole. Haider was a political innovator in that he pioneered many of the elements of a right-wing populist politics that learned to use the commercialized and tabloidized media to great effect. Many of the tactics he deployed during the 1990s in his initial rise – the use of campaign slogans that looked like tabloid headlines, his careful crafting of a self-image as the ally of the people against the system, the use of the rally, the petition and the referendum to underline the populist nature of his pitch – have been widely copied. Hungary’s opposition leader and former Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán has shamelessly copied many of Haider’s tactics. The parallels with Silvio Berlusconi’s construction of his appeal are similarly obvious.

As I’ve argued on this blog before, when commentators look at Austria’s radical right they are obsessed with what it reveals about the country’s relationship to its past. What they miss is the way Austria’s radical right is better seen as a warning about a possible future for politics across Europe. The populist right that Haider shaped in Austria speaks to those who engage with the tabloid media and commercial television; it positions itself as the voice of popular “common sense” against elites. Established parties have found this kind of populism difficult to deal with. Whether they are any more successful in future will determine Haider’s legacy, and possibly the future of politics across the continent as a whole.