The deliberately provocative main title for this session was actually an afterthought which occurred to me as I was thinking about the Freedom Party plan: From Party-State to Citizens' Democracy. The way to the Third Republic. Its proposals are a reaction to the changes in the political landscape which has been the subject of Hans-Georg Betz's paper and to the obsolescence of Austrian corporatism addressed by Markus Crepaz. That the Second Republic should be replaced was viewed by those who see the Freedom Party and its Chairman Jörg Haider's as right-extremist and his proposal for a "Third Republic" as a cover for a "Fourth Reich."

I have long rejected the right-extremist label for the FPÖ and initially became acquainted with Hans-Georg when he called to chat about the FPÖ after reading the published version of my 1991 GSA paper analyzing "The Revitalization of the Austrian Freedom Party since 1986." In that paper I had taken exception with his inclusion of the FPÖ as part of ". . . a rising tide of right-wing radical parties in Western Europe," arguing a line similar to that subsequently taken by Michael Minkenberg regarding the New Right in Germany, namely that the resurgence of the FPÖ was due to structural changes in the Austrian electorate which had produced new cleavages and new lines of partisan conflict that place it outside the framework of right-wing extremism of the past. At that time I was reacting against the view of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW) which effectively sees modern rightist political phenomena within the historical framework of fascism and National-Socialism and more recently has dramatized its position on the FPÖ by making Haider its "coverboy" posed with the symbolic flag of neo-Nazism for its 1993 Handbuch des Österreichischen Rechtsextremismus. The paper that follows does not represent a reversal of my earlier rejection of this interpretation, but rather a refinement that ensued when Hans-Georg asked me to contribute a chapter on the FPÖ to a book that he and Stefan Immerfall were planning to put together on right-radical populist parties. I initially declined, citing my preference to reserve the designation right-extremist for the abortion-doctor murderers, letter-bombers and the like. Distinguishing between right-radical and right-extremist, Hans-Georg expressed the belief that what I would write would be quite compatible with the foreseen orientation of the book and urged me to read his Radical-Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe, before refusing. Indeed I found that my perception of the FPÖ fit well within the framework of the book planned and agreed to participate. The remarks that follow are partially drawn from that contribution.

In reflecting on what is now almost exactly a decade of Haider leadership, I am presently inclined to divide the period into two parts, with the period from the October 1990 parliamentary election to the Vienna municipal election a year later as a period of transition. In the previous four years, the FPÖ had experienced dramatic increases in voter share in seven consecutive state elections. My 1991 GSA paper argued that these successes primarily benefited from a focus on problems that could be laid at the door of the SPÖ-ÖVP federal government coalition, e.g. unemployment, waste of tax monies, corruption and excessive political patronage, scandals, the need to privatize state-owned enterprises, lower taxes, reduce regulations on business and individuals and only in select cases on state issues. The statement that most Austrians were part of the "German ethnic and cultural community" remained in the program, but overt appeals to the German-nationalism that has been at the core of the ideological camp from which the FPÖ emerged and which the DÖW sees as central to right-extremism were not evident.

The issues so effectively exploited in the period from 1986-1990 had been consistent FPÖ themes for thirty years, but had never made the FPÖ any more than the fraction in what was once described as a two-and-a-half party system. By the mid-80's however, the dissatisfaction with the modern welfare-state that had produced the successes of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. was beginning to develop in Austria as well. This had cost the SPÖ its absolute majority in 1983 and contributed to the 1986 revolt against the liberal leadership of its FPÖ coalition partner which made Haider chairman. When, following the 1986 election, the ÖVP accepted the invitation of the SPÖ to end its sixteen year absence from government, it moved to the Center, precisely at the time that a considerable segment of the electorate was becoming susceptible to the right-radical populism that had been growing in other Western-style democracies throughout the 80's.

Relatively protected from the currents that had stimulated the growth of right-radical populism elsewhere, Die Wende of 1990 brought Austria into the mainstream of those forces that Plasser/Uram have identified as responsible:

For Austria, they specifically cite "... a disgust with parties and politics that is significantly above average ... excessive manipulation of the political system by the parties ... pervasive patronage ... opposition reactions against an 'excessively powerful' government coalition ...." In applying the term radical right-populism to the FPÖ, Plasser/Ulram have accepted a typology for these kinds of parties established by Hans-Georg Betz and I do as well, because it avoids the more typically used right-extremist label more appropriately reserved for those who act outside the democratic system and who either incite or resort to terror to promote their ends. The FPÖ definitely meets the socio-cultural, -political and -economic criteria of the radical right-populism. It is radical in its rhetoric against immigrants and "social parasites" and also because it wants to replace the statist Second Republic with a Third Republic based on the techniques of direct democracy, thus adding to the populist image it had long curried as the voice of the "little man" against the "big parties" and the dominance and privileges that their "social partnership" brought.

In 1990, the slogan, "Vienna must not become Chicago," used by the Viennese FPÖ in the 1990 federal parliamentary campaign, is perhaps the first evidence of the shift to a more radical and modern right-populism. It implicitly connected immigration which had exploded in the wake of the fall of the "Iron Curtain" with the crime rate that had risen 5 per cent the previous year and was in the process of escalating to 8 per cent in 1990. Although it was less blatant than the ÖVP appeal, "Vienna for the Viennese," the FPÖ slogan was confirmation of its racism in the eyes of its critics. To the list of characteristics which they had long used to label the FPÖ right-extremist, were now added its exploitation of anxiety about immigration and antipathy for multiculturalism which in turn united the intellectual elites of the Left in what has become known as the "antifa" cause. Meanwhile, the erstwhile Socialist working class resonated to FPÖ complaints about the "social engineering" policies of the schicki-micki elites "up there," accepting its straight-line correlation between the increase in the numbers of foreigners and the rise in crime and unemployment. While the shrillness of its campaign was probably responsible for the loss of some better educated, white-collar voters, the gain among workers more than compensated and helped win the FPÖ the largest voter-share for a third-party in the Second Republic. (See Table 1.1). Elsewhere the FPÖ campaign retained more its protest-opposition character and the structural profile remained that of the 1986-1989 period.

The new radical right-populism that had surfaced in Vienna in 1990 became even more evident in that city's municipal elections the next year. There were three major issues: transportation, housing and foreigners and the FPÖ attributed revelations of mismanagement and waste in housing and subway construction to the essentially permanent rule of the SPÖ. Immigration, however, remained the burning issue. The FPÖ emphasized the pressure this put on housing and the availability of jobs, but focused on the schools where in some districts, it claimed, German-speaking children were reduced to a 20-25 percent minority. Despite charges of racism, almost 40 per cent of the population identified immigration as a serious, contemporary problem. Among them, every second voter saw the FPÖ as the most competent party to deal with the foreigner question, a factor that was cited as decisive for one third of FPÖ voters, particularly among those who defected from the SPÖ. Post-election analysis shows however, that protest remained the dominant factor behind the FPÖ success, with nothing to indicate nostalgic sympathy for German-national, fascist or National Socialist themes. Even Haider, who is so often portrayed as a "brown shirt" in modern dress, was among the least cited reasons for switching to the FPÖ. For the Viennese establishment, the consequences of this new political climate were stunning. The SPÖ slipped below 50 per cent for the first time in the Second Republic and the FPÖ climbed from 9.7 per cent in 1987 to 22.5 per cent. It tripled its number of seats in the city council and became the second largest party represented. Particularly striking was the fact that over 26 per cent of the working class and 35 per cent of all skilled workers voted for the FPÖ. In state elections in Styria and Upper Austria a few weeks before, the FPÖ also won successes attributed to a "... massive breach in the SPÖ core constituencies," the "foreigner question" and "welfare-cheating" and a transformation of the FPÖ "from a party of elites to a worker party."

Late in 1992, the FPÖ reached for even broader mass support when it attempted to capitalize on the government's rejection of its restrictive proposals on immigration by launching an initiative campaign entitled "Austria first." It proposed to add a statement to the Federal Constitution declaring that Austria was not a classic country of immigration and to institute a number of other measures to deal with public health, education welfare and housing that it contended were being adversely affected. A Gallup Poll initially showed 1.68 million in support, but then a high profile immigrants' rights group mounted a counter-campaign that skillfully portrayed the initiative as a racist, implicitly nazistic, anti-foreigner crusade against industrious and indispensable guest workers and helpless refugees fleeing poverty, political repression and civil war and was given high-profile support by the SPÖ. Within the FPÖ, a handful of Liberals in the parliamentary fraction drew the same conclusion from a provision that would have limited the number of school-children who did not speak German as a mother-tongue to thirty percent of public school classes and set up parallel classes for the foreigners when that percentage was exceeded. When they failed to force its modification, former General-Secretary and 1992 FPÖ-presidential candidate Heide Schmidt, ex-Defense Minister Friedhelm Frischenschlager and a few others defected to form the Liberal Forum. When I questioned Haider on their contention that the mother-tongue stipulation meant ethnicity, not language competency, he denied the charge, arguing that the FPÖ had simply used the Berlin model adopted under the eminently respectable former mayor and subsequent Federal President Richard von Weizäcker. While Berlin had indeed wrestled with the same problem, the criterion there was the "knowledge of the German language" of the "foreign children." It should, however, also be noted that the term "mother-tongue" was used in parliamentary discussions by both coalition parties and can by no means be seen as unique to the FPÖ. In response to further questions on this issue Haider left the impression that he is indeed concerned about more than mere language facility. The issue is culture and is related to his frequently-stated desire to protect "the homeland" against pressure for multicultural policies of the government. His statement that immigrants who were becoming integrated were "no longer a problem" suggests that the racist charge was bogus and that the real debate should have been about the FPÖ's real goal of preserving the cultural character of Austria against the inevitable changes that come with heavy immigration. That debate, however, did not occur and against the background of attacks on foreigners and counter-marches against right-wing terrorism in Germany and a massive candlelight parade against the "anti-foreigner" initiative in Vienna, fewer than half of those who had initially said they would support "Austria first" actually signed it. The media declared it a "flop," congratulated Austrians on having recovered from their recent drift to the Right and declared Haider politically dead.

Like Mark Twain upon hearing of a publication of his obituary, Haider might have remarked that the report of his death was an exaggeration. Less than two months later, the FPÖ extended its record of electoral successes in three state elections. In Carinthia it won 33.28 per cent and came within one seat of parity with the SPÖ and made small gains in both Salzburg and Tyrol. Exit polls in all three elections again showed protest against the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition, against its recently negotiated treaty for entry into the EU and fear of immigration to be dominant factors in the FPÖ vote. These motives are consistent with earlier gains and indeed the attitudes of the radical, populist "New Right" everywhere, but to suggest, as do the Austrian "Antifa," that they are a reflection of an unconquered past seems an exaggeration that fails to recognize that racism and xenophobia are modern phenomena that need not be and probably are not linked to National Socialism.

Illustrative of the volatility of this new electorate was the result of the June 1994 plebiscite to approve the treaty negotiated to join the EU. Thinking to exploit the populist trend where voters in EU-countries Denmark and France only narrowly approved the Maastricht Treaty and Switzerland declined to apply, the FPÖ urged a no vote, while trying to justify its retreat from its long-standing support for European integration on the grounds that the treaty gave too much power to the "Bureaucrats in Brussels." A resounding 66.34 percent rejected this position, Haider's popularity ratings dropped into the cellar and his enemies in the media interpreted the vote as a defeat for the right-extremism they associated with the unsuccessful anti-EU campaign. What this interpretation failed to recognize was that the FPÖ successes of the past eight years had not been built on any kind of nostalgic right-extremist ideology, but rather on protest against the established order and more recently upon radical proposals to end the ossified status quo. A yes vote for the EU did not in any way temper the alienation of the electorate and the widely reported "Europhoria" did not rub off on the SPÖ-ÖVP coalition.

The FPÖ parliamentary campaign begun just three months later provides specific evidence to justify its categorization as a right-radical populist party according to the criteria outlined by Betz and Plasser/Ulram cited above. Its themes however, do not represent extremism relative to a political mainstream which on the international level had already been diverted to the Right by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This new, populist Right is far from conservative however, and mirroring Newt Gingrich's "new American revolution," Jörg Haider proposed a "Third Republic" for Austria. For Americans simultaneously going through mid-term congressional elections, and particularly Californians who additionally were experiencing the high-spending Feinstein-Huffington senatorial race and Governor Wilson's bid for reelection against the background of the Proposition 187 campaign, the FPÖ's emphasis on crime, immigration and moral values would have been familiar. To emphasize the crime issue, Haider selected, as second on the FPÖ candidate list, a woman jurist and former ÖVP member who expressed her concern about crime and immigration and who implied her personal belief in the death penalty. In contrast to California where her support for the death penalty would have been too mild, profil unsubtly characterized her concern about crime as an obsession with "Blut und Banden" and criticized her statement that "life in prison must mean life" as simplistic. On immigration the FPÖ had established its credentials with the "Austria first" initiative. Even the easing of the problem due to highly restrictive legislation subsequently passed by the government may have redounded to the benefit of the FPÖ. Those who agreed with the criticism of profil that the legislation was excessive and just pandering to the voters to avoid defection were unlikely to have voted for the FPÖ anyway, and those anxious about immigration, even if they had shied away from an open admission of their concern by signing "Austria first" could attribute the improvement to FPÖ pressure. On the values front, with the ÖVP committed, "without any ifs, ands or buts," to continuing in coalition with an SPÖ that many Conservatives held responsible for the decline of values, the moral Right had no other place to go than to the FPÖ. Haider staked the FPÖ claim for this support in his book, Die Freiheit die ich meine, citing the social-welfare state and moral-free materialism as the source of the modern malaise. A good example of what is wrong with modern society he contends, is what has happened to the family, substantially because materialism has driven mothers to work. Taking on the feminists, Haider proposed tax incentives to permit mothers to remain home and raise their children and for those who must or want to work, he proposed more day-care centers unrestricted by class or party membership. In reaction, one critic drew the inevitable parallel with the Nazi policy of Kinder, Kirche, Küche and accused him of anti-foreigner racism for wanting to encourage the birthrate of Austrians. These ideological waters were however considerably muddied in the summer of 1994 by the wife of the SPÖ Chancellor, who, in an interview with profil, touted "family values" and criticized mothers who put their children in day-care at seven in the morning "... in order to earn maybe four- or five-thousand Shillings." The SPÖ was embarrassed and feminists exploded in rage, but a poll showed the public split virtually evenly on her views. By extension then, it can be inferred that close to half the public does not see the views of Haider and the FPÖ on this issue as reminiscent of National Socialism.

Above all, in the 1994 FPÖ campaign, charges of scandal and patronage were critical. Accusations of party-favoritism, waste and corruption have been a hallmark of FPÖ campaigns since its founding and in his televised debate with SPÖ-Chancellor Vranitzky, Haider scored heavily on these issues. Taking a cue from Ross Perot, he held up a chart showing exorbitant salaries and pensions paid to the Chancellor's party colleagues in the Styrian Chamber of Labor and charged "secret deals" as just some examples of the "swamp" of finance, economics and housing policy created by the patronage of the "old parties" via the "social partnership" and exacerbated by twenty-five years of "Socialist" rule. Vranitzky declared these complaints "old hat," and not his responsibility, but they registered favorably for Haider in a post-debate poll. All these issues ended up matching closely with the most important motives cited for an FPÖ vote in exit polls.

Of the four remaining motives, three may be ascribed to diffuse protest and disgust with politics as usual. Only one: "the FPÖ most clearly represents my interests, or my tradition," may be interpreted as evidence of the German-nationalist ideology that is associated by FPÖ-critics with right-extremism, fascism and Nazism.

Nor was the party's biggest growth among voters typically associated with right-extremism. Shocking those who believed that the FPÖ had reached the limit of its natural constituency in 1990, it jumped almost 6 per cent to 22.5 per cent. While the FPÖ did lose middle-class voters to the Greens, the Liberal Forum and to abstentions, defections from the SPÖ alone accounted for two thousand votes more than its total increase. These SPÖ-defectors constituted almost a quarter of the entire FPÖ total, maintaining the position of workers as the largest single demographic group in the FPÖ that was achieved in 1990. (See Table 1.1 above.) 11.1 per cent of the total had voted ÖVP in 1990. Beyond the 6.7 per cent increase won by the FPÖ in urban centers with 'traditional' worker precincts, it won almost comparable increases in rural-agricultural and mixed regions as well as 5.6 per cent increases in industrial and service regions in economic problem zones in Styria, Upper Austria and Carinthia and in the western industrial and tourist regions. The smallest increase was 4.4 per cent in regions with a high concentration of well-qualified white-collar workers, who had traditionally been dominant in the FPÖ electorate.

Another issue which surfaced, but did not register on the voter's radar screens was Haider's provocative statement that the Second Republic was obsolete and should be replaced by a "Third Republic." Placed in the context of the history of the Second Republic, what Haider was effectively saying was that Austrian democracy had out-grown the party- and neo-corporatism state upon which it had originally been based. Befitting contemporary reality, Haider argued, there should be a transition to a plebiscitary democracy in which the parties would serve only as a vehicle for electing representatives, who would then take their orders from an active citizenry rather than from a party apart. Appropriately, the FPÖ began calling itself the F-Movement, or "die Freiheitlichen," and adopted statutes in 1995 to incorporate the changes. It also proposed constitutional changes to provide for the direct election of governors and mayors and a strong Minister-President according to French and U.S. models. The federal government would be elected by Parliament and made responsive to the will of the people by frequent consultative referenda. While FPÖ-reformers see a future of increased local and regional freedom from the federal government and more active citizen participation, the "Antifa" called attention to Hitler's combination of his office of Chancellor with the office of President following Hindenburg's death in 1934.

This theoretical debate on the putative right-extremism of the FPÖ was overshadowed by a real extremist act, a bombing in the Burgenland village of Oberwart on February 5, 1995 where two Roma (gypsies) were killed. A link to the recent letter bombs of the German-nationalist, anti-foreigner "Bajuwarian Liberation Army" (BBA) was immediately suspected and later proven. Despite the lack of any evidence implicating the FPÖ, much of the quality press held the party responsible for creating a climate of hatred which encouraged such violence. In the parliamentary debate that took place three days after the Oberwart explosions, Haider rejected the "terror" that he anticipated "pious" Leftists would direct against him and his fraction, stating that the violence had no ideological stamp, but rather was the work of "... a network, that across Europe is working to destabilize democracies." Citing the minority rights problem as another possible cause, he touted his own success in Carinthia in this regard and indicted the SPÖ government of Burgenland and the ÖVP government of Oberwart for failing to integrate "... an ethnic minority that fifty years ago was practically exterminated in the penal camps National Socialism." The "pious terrorists" of the SPÖ did accuse him of minimizing the crimes of National Socialism by using the term "penal camp," but in this case, the criticism of a speech in which he specifically called attention to the genocide of National Socialism probably won him points among those fed up with the requirements of "politically correct" speech.

Yet another bomb exacerbated the tension between the FPÖ and the SPÖ in the early morning hours of April 20, when two young men were killed in an attempt to blow up an electrical tower in the village of Ebergassing near Vienna. Because "Nazi Hunter" Wolfgang Purtscheller had warned of the possibility of bombings around Easter and because April 20 is Hitler's birth date, there was some speculation that this might again be the work of right-extremists. Closer investigation however, revealed that the victims were autonomist/anarchist Leftists who had mistakenly blown themselves up in their attempt to protest the construction of the power line. Haider seized upon this to suggest that the other bombings were also the work of Left-extremists trying to discredit the FPÖ. The FPÖ-newspaper accompanied these charges with a diagram of "the network" tying together the headquarters of the bombers, the Communist, Social Democratic and Green parties, the Document Archive (DÖW), "antifa" writers, the state broadcasting service, profil and other prominent newspapers. The FPÖ attack grew even more shrill when it was discovered that the SPÖ Minister of Interior, Caspar Einem, had donated money to the left-radical publication TATblatt which it charged had encouraged left-terrorism. Einem had been appointed Minister of Interior only a few weeks before and had immediately become the darling of the media, being touted as the new "anti-Haider" and a possible successor to Chancellor Vranitzky who had appeared lackluster in the election campaign the previous fall. Haider, whose reputation as a right-extremist had been established by the assigning of guilt by association, now turned the tactic to his own advantage, calling for a vote of no-confidence against the Minister of Interior. The Chancellor and speakers for the SPÖ responded in kind, charging that Haider's articles and interviews in rightist publications had been responsible creating a climate within which right-terrorism had arisen.

When this tantrum on both the Left and Right had passed, the problem of the deficit and how to deal with it still overshadowed all other political concerns. The SPÖ-ÖVP coalition that had been cobbled together following the 1994 election had been seriously strained in reaching a "savings package" in the spring. It then fell apart on Friday, the 13th of October, when the new ÖVP Chairman, Wolfgang Schüssel, withdrew from the coalition charging economic mismanagement and gambling that his popularity in the polls could bring a relative majority in new elections scheduled for 17. December and make him chancellor.

Jörg Haider had indirectly contributed to this chain of events when, following the election just a year before, he had offered to support a minority ÖVP government as a means of ending "business as usual." ÖVP Chairman Eduard Busek spurned the offer, honoring his pledge during the campaign to support the coalition "without any ifs, ands or buts." For those fed up with serving as handmaiden to the SPÖ, Busek's promise was the cause of the worst ÖVP showing in history. In April of 1995, Busek was replaced by Wolfgang Schüssel who then sought to define himself by trumpeting the newly fashionable, conservatives idea of smaller government, frugality and deficit reduction against his SPÖ partners in the government. Soon he was being touted as a "Haider-killer" who could sufficiently unite the middle-classes and bring an end to the twenty-five year dominance of the SPÖ, still called "Socialists" in conservative circles.

As if to cooperate, the SPÖ went into its own period of self-doubt. Vranitzky was widely reported to be "tired of office" and General-Secretary Josef Cap was fired causing profil to raise the question whether the SPÖ could "still be saved." In a poll published early in October by profil, the Chancellor ranked only fourth in the "Politicians' Hitparade," his worst showing ever and down 14 points from the previous poll. Jörg Haider, meanwhile, had gained 7 points and the top of the list was crowned by ÖVP-Chairman Wolfgang Schüssel who had become Austria's "political darling" by sitting back and letting the SPÖ wrestle unsuccessfully with the budget while criticizing it for wanting "to simply continue the frauds of the past for another year." Undoubtedly buoyed by his own personal popularity and the prospect that he might actually be able to lead his party to a majority, Schüssel grasped at the chance to become Chancellor and on Friday the 13. of October introduced a resolution, which then passed, setting 17. December as the date for the election..

The question that dominated the ensuing campaign even more than the budget impasse was whether Schüssel would form a coalition with the FPÖ. Haider indicated his openness to a coalition with the ÖVP, although stating that if the FPÖ were not the strongest party, he would remain in Parliament and nominate someone else as Vice-Chancellor. Nor would Schüssel rule out the possibility of a coalition with the FPÖ, thus prompting the SPÖ, the Greens and the Liberal Forum towards a decidedly "antifa" campaign against Haider and the FPÖ. Schüssel, for his part, reversed the "politics of the Center" that had ruined his predecessor the previous year. Running as the "good Haider," he adopted much of the FPÖ's populist program for cutting the social-welfare state, writing off everything to the right of the ÖVP as "negative energy." For the first time, Haider was put on the defensive. Polls showed the budget, cutting government expenditures, the economy and taxes to be the dominant issues in the voters minds and the ÖVP as the more competent of the two conservative parties to deal with them. Moreover, the economy was improving and immigration, which the SPÖ-ÖVP government had brought under control, had declined in importance.

The center piece of the FPÖ campaign was a 20-point "Contract with Austria" which substantially meets the criteria for radical right-populism as outlined by Plasser/Ulram and Betz. The "Contract" called for frugality, reduction in taxes, the replacement of subsidies to business with tax incentives, a reduction of subsidies to the parties and the elimination of those for the press, an end to early pensions while securing the stability of pension funds, the elimination of the national debt and the balancing of the federal budget, defense against a loss of rights to the EU, the strengthening of direct democracy through the initiative and referendum process and restricting immigration. It was packaged in a slick brochure with a picture of Haider against a gold background on the front with the text in party-color blue: "He has not lied to you! Simply honest, simply Jörg." The SPÖ countered with a brochure mimicking that of the FPÖ but entitled "the lies of Jörg Haider" and profil helped out with a cover replicating the FPÖ slogan, but reading: "He has lied to you!" and in the sub-text where the FPÖ boasted of Haider's honesty it promised in the related article: "His biggest lies collected and reproduced." Featured inside was a photograph of an F-billboard defaced to show Haider with a Pinocchio nose and a story charging him with conducting the most brutal campaign in the history of the Second Republic.

It was indeed a brutal campaign and a profil article, "Blood spots on a white vest" contributed. This was the title given to a report on the opening of an exhibition featuring graphic photographs of atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht, in which most Austrians have relatives who had served and like to think were not guilty of the war crimes attributed to the SS. Profil noted the visits by SPÖ, Green and Liberal Forum politicians and caustically reported on the ÖVP and FPÖ politicians who had been "too busy" to attend, but still found time to travel to the Ulrichsberg ceremony honoring Second World War veterans in far-off Carinthia. Real blood was shed that same week when there were more letter-bombings in the series that had targeted people sympathetic to immigrants. Most commentaries interpreted the new incidents as an effort to undermine the Second Republic and prepare the way for the third Republic urged by the FPÖ, while Haider reiterated his suggestion that the perpetrators were in fact left-terrorists conspiring to discredit him and his stand against excessive and illegal immigration and the party newspaper speculated that the culprits were autonomist-anarchists associated with those who had blown themselves up in an ill-fated bombing the previous spring and who were part of a "network" linked to the "Greens."

Despite the venom of the "antifa" campaign against the FPÖ and its commensurate response, the right-radical populist issues the FPÖ had so successfully exploited over the past five years had receded somewhat. A longitudinal poll over the period of the campaign showed that immediately before the election, the usual FPÖ themes of foreigners, costs and benefits of EU-membership, scandals and corruption all at under ten per cent among questions cited as important. Early pensions and welfare cheating ranked at 16 per cent, with the budget, cutting government expenditures, the economy and taxes at 43 per cent and concern that savings be carried out with concern for the needy at 28 per cent. With its usual issues not resonating very loudly, a new "hot button" was found. It was art and focused on the role played by SPÖ Minister of Art, Rudolf Scholten, in subsidizing and directing its development. While conservatives in Austria, as in the U.S., have been long been uncomfortable with modern art and critical of government subsidization of it, what became a "culture war" in the 1995 election first began to develop in opposition to the production by the Claus Peymann, the leftist, German-born director of the venerable Burgtheater, of Heldenplatz by the renegade, "nest-befouler" Thomas Bernhard in October of 1988. In March of that year, Austria had struggled through a difficult commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluß by Nazi Germany and while the production's reminders of the enthusiasm with which the annexation was received by many and the implication that some of the same sentiment still existed were welcomed by the "antifa" Left, it outraged conservatives and was pilloried in the tabloids. Scholten's support and continued appointment of Peymann whose patronage of dramatists who promote the "antifa" campaign and multicultural agenda have made him an arch-enemy of both the ÖVP and FPÖ. Thus, in addition to its usual attack on "social parasites," particularly foreigners who misuse the welfare system, on waste, corruption, bloated salaries of party-appointed public officials and the like, the FPÖ posted a placard asking: "Do you love Scholten, Jelinek, Häupl, Peymann, Pasterk ... or art and culture? Given the recent letter-bombings, this targeting, not only of SPÖ politicians, but also of artists, caused dramatist Elfriede Jelinek to express her fear that "as a feminist, Leftist and not pure Aryan," she was also in danger." The real victim, Haider countered, was himself, targeted by "left cultural fascists" subsidized by Scholten. This attack may be seen as right-radical and populist on at least two levels: 1) The attack on modern art, which parallels that of Jesse Helms and U.S. Republicans on the work of the late Robert Mapplethorpe, et. al., reflects Haider's charge that such art is evidence of moral decline and the need to return to traditional values, and 2) it uses this moral position to call the very concept of state subsidies of art into question. At a time of drastic cuts in social programs across the board, the demand for the reduction or elimination of state subsidies in the "Contract with Austria" so transparently borrowed from the GOP legislative campaign of 1994, has wide appeal.

A journalistic bombshell that may have had more impact on the election than the real bombs of recent months was actually fired from across the border by the German ARD television network. It was the airing, just four days before the election, of an amateur video showing Haider speaking at a gathering of war veterans, including former Waffen-SS members, in Krumpendorf, Carinthia on 30. September held as part of the festivities surrounding the Ulrichsberg celebration the next day. In his prepared remarks Haider condemned the "political correctness" of the media which damned such "meetings of the older generation who just want to get together in comradeship and remember what they had been through together, what they had experienced and what they stand for today." There was no reasonable argument against such meetings he

said: "only that some people can't stand that in this world there are still respectable human beings, who have character and who stand by and have remained true to their convictions even against the tide.... We have money for terrorists, we have money for newspapers that urge terror [in reference to TATblatt and the anarchist/autonomist bombing of the past spring] and we have money for lazy rabble, but we don't have money for respectable human beings." He then expressed his respect for

Although ORF chose not to air the video showing Haider's speech at the gathering until after the election, it was widely and misleadingly reported in the press that he had called SS-veterans his "dear friends" and praised them for their character and convictions.

It is difficult to say precisely how much the Krumpendorf-video affected the election results, since it had been agreed that polling would stop ten days before the election and at that time 30 per cent were still undecided. A summary of the projections by four major polling institutes relative to the actual results suggests that the SPÖ, as might be expected, benefited the most. The Fessel-Institut exit polls also shows that of voters who had switched to the SPÖ, 56 per cent had made this decision in the last two weeks.

For the SPÖ, although this was its second lowest voter-share in history, the increase of 3.4 per cent from the previous year was significant and its first since 1975. Of the SPÖ total, roughly 2.75 per cent came from the FPÖ, presumably workers drawn back to the fold and approximately 1.85 per cent each from the Greens and Liberal Forum, probably a response to the threat of an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition. This was indicated already early in the campaign, at a time when the Gallup poll showed the SPÖ at 30-32%, the ÖVP at 25-27% and the FPÖ at 25-27%. When, however people were asked how they would vote if the decision whether Haider were to become chancellor were up to them, the FPÖ vote fell off to only 16%, while the SPÖ moved up to almost precisely what it actually won in the election. Beyond the fear factor, another ingredient in the SPÖ recovery was its promise to protect Austria from the excessive cuts in social programs that were causing massive strikes in France at precisely this time. Although the campaign against the possibility of an ÖVP-FPÖ coalition worked for the SPÖ, the losses of the Greens and the Liberal Forum meant that a "traffic-light" coalition (Reds-Greens-Liberals) was no closer to a working majority than before the election. Similarly, Schüssel's shift to the Right and "cat and mouse game" on the coalition question gained his party only 28.3 per cent, a scant .6 per cent above its historic low the previous year and left him no closer to power than before the election. The focused attack of all parties on Haider apparently had some effect. The FPÖ received 13,000 fewer votes than in 1994, and, when translated into voter-share, the 21.89 per cent this represented when the final adjustments were made in the count was well below the 24-26 per cent projected by the early polls and accepted as its goal. The .61 per cent decline and loss of two seats was also the first decline in either a state or federal election since Haider had assumed control of the party. The FPÖ however, continued to dramatically increase its standing as a party of skilled workers. (See above Table 1.1). Also, although the FPÖ may have run another radical right-populist campaign, the motives of its voters were more diverse. Concern about immigration was indeed important, but it ranked only third, behind the stated motive: "because the FPÖ is for fiscal austerity and against abuse of the social-welfare system" and well behind its reputation for uncovering corruption and scandals. Haider, the tradition of the party, "sending them a message" and "lesser of the evils" ranked fourth through seventh in that order..

The results of the election really precluded anything other than a renewal of the grand coalition. In my chapter for the Betz-Immerfall book finished in late December, I agreed with the conventional wisdom and wrote that "...yet another edition of the SPÖ-ÖVP "grand coalition, albeit with the two-thirds majority necessary to pass constitutional amendments that was lost in 1994" would be concluded. I did not, however, subscribe to the speculation of some that the tide had turned against Haider and the FPÖ. Rather, I wrote:

Difficult negotiations for a new, grand coalition were indeed successfully concluded and a budget agreement was ultimately agreed upon, but the factors which contributed to growth Politikverdrossenheit over the past ten years and the commensurate popularity of the FPÖ remain. At this writing, the ÖVP again seems to be immersed in a internal ideological struggle and the increased prominence of conservative parliamentary fraction leader Andreas Khol promises only to increase tension vis-a-vis the SPÖ. Continuing public alienation was reflected in the Burgenland Landtag election on 9. June of this year when the FPÖ returned to its winning ways with a 14.57 per cent voter-share, up 4.83 per cent from 1991, while the SPÖ and ÖVP lost 3.66 and 2.17 per cent respectively. The magnitude of the FPÖ success was, however, less significant than it appeared. The previous election had taken place five years before at a time when the "Haider-Effekt" in Landtag elections had been dramatic. Only ten days before the Burgenland election however, Haider had made his comment to the effect that the "employment policy" of the Third Reich had had a favorable impact on reducing unemployment. In the ensuing uproar, he lost his position as Governor of Carinthia on a no-confidence vote engineered by the SPÖ with the support of the ÖVP whose Chairman was then made Governor. Thus the FPÖ won only 9.75% relative to the 11-13% projected in a poll the week before Haider's remark. In this context, half of the 1996 victory may be seen as a recouping of votes that were lost at the last minute in 1991. Indeed, the FPÖ did not claim a victory for its program, but instead interpreted it as a protest against the federal budget and as voice of disappointment with the results of EU membership in the only part of Austria designated as a "Goal-1-Region" and scheduled to receive the highest subsidies.

As we sit here, the votes are being counted for representation to the European Parliament and in the Vienna municipal elections. The 1. September submission date for this paper precludes any meaningful discussion of these campaigns, but at the date of this writing it appears that disillusionment with the EU along with negative reactions to the austerity budget recently enacted by the SPÖ-ÖVP government and anger at the double- and triple-dipping salaries of its politicians will make the elections into a referendum on the latest iteration of the coalition. Protest may make the FPÖ into the second-largest fraction Austrian delegation in Strassbourg, perhaps only barely smaller than the SPÖ. In Vienna, polls show SPÖ-mayoral candidate Michael Häupl unchallenged in popularity, but his party incapable of holding the absolute majority it has enjoyed throughout the history of the Second Republic. The same issues that aid the FPÖ in the EU election are also at play in Vienna. Additionally, immigration has again become the "hot button" issue for the FPÖ in a campaign which profil, with a characteristic lack of subtlety, caustically calls "Kraft durch Feinde." In the spring, FPÖ opposition contributed to the decision of the government to postpone action on a controversial "integration packet" that would have permitted the entry of family members of immigrants who had been left behind. SPÖ mayoral candidate Michael Häupl would have liked to have let the immigration issue lie, but was subverted in August when his own party colleague, Interior Minister Einem, proposed opening the labor market to all foreigners who had lived legally in Austria for five years. This played right into the hand of the FPÖ which has called for the suspension of immigration and expulsion of all unemployed foreigners and those convicted of crime. With joblessness rising among Austrians and double-digit unemployment among foreigners, this core issue of right-radical populism seems certain to permit the FPÖ to further strengthen its position as the second strongest party in the Vienna municipal government. Furthermore, polls on the "Sunday question" indicate that if federal elections were also to be held today, the FPÖ would rebound from its loss last year and leap over the ÖVP into second position in the Nationalrat as well.

This recovery may suggest that the "Antifa" have "cried wolf" once too often. German political scientist Claus Leggewie implied as much in a forum entitled "This hysterical 'Nazi-Nazi' bellowing," published in the middle of the 1995 campaign by profil. He pronounced Austria an almost completely normal ("stinknormale") West-European democracy. One of the exceptions was a fixation on blocking a bourgeois coalition including Haider that reflected a failure to understand the modernization that had taken place in society. Only two conditions, he felt, would need to be changed to put Austria fully into the west-European democratic mainstream: 1) end neutrality and 2) join NATO. Ironically, Haider had proposed both in the wake of the end of the Cold War and German reunification and was charged with right-extremism for suggesting them. Writer and essayist Robert Menasse described Haider as an late-born Austrofascist, but admitted that he had been a "useful idiot" in that he had served as the catalyst in the process of democratic development that is now recontouring Austrian politics. Austrian political science professor Rudolf Burger disagreed with the Austro-fascist label calling Haider an eclecticist and sees those who profess to find in him the possibility of fascism as blinded by history and failing to understand modern Austrian and international realities.

Leggewie and Burger sustain the thesis posited at the outset of this essay, namely that the threat posed by the FPÖ is not that of a recrudescent fascism. While other parties, intellectuals and journalists may believe that they know what is best for the country and frequently find totalitarian tendencies in its radical right-populism, the public in Austria, as here, seems to be dismissing their warnings as the irrelevant outrage of Left/liberal elites whose game is finally up. As long as Austrian governments continue to be constituted by parties with fundamentally opposed philosophies, then the current gridlock seems destined to continue and the FPÖ stands to benefit in the opposition, despite the fact that its politicians are overwhelmingly cited as the most damaging to the image of the country. The increasing disgust of the voting public with "politics as usual" and the continuing erosion of party loyalty suggests that looser, electoral movements of the type foreseen by the F-reorganization of 1995 may be in the offing. An optimistic view of this trend is that the result will be the end of the "party-state" and a stronger parliament with closer ties of its members to their constituents and not the chaos and ensuing Führer-state dictatorship that the "Antifa" see reflected in Haider's proposed Third Republic. Certainly strong presidents and plebiscites recall the techniques used by Napoleon III, Mussolini and Hitler. Their dictatorships were, however, built in societies without any lengthy experience with representative democracy. Austria today, despite the budget crisis and debt problems that exploded as political issues in 1995, enjoys one of the world's highest standards of living and has matured as a democratic republic in the past fifty years. In a comparison of the responses of Austrians and Americans to the same or similar questions testing opinions on the issues identified with radical right-populism I found FPÖ voters quite close in their Politikverdrossenheit to the general American electorate, while the general Austrian electorate was somewhat less alienated. In any case Austrians show no support for warmed-over fascism and the technology that earlier generations feared would contribute to totalitarianism now seems more likely to weaken the power of central government. The changes proposed by the FPÖ are indeed radical and the sentiments driving them are right-populist, but would be mainstream among the American futurist-conservatives from whom Haider admits he has drawn ideas and inspiration.

ENDNOTES

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