Word: austria
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider, who was killed in a car crash in his home province of Carinthia very early on Saturday morning, was his native country's best-known person, his sharp and perpetually tanned features ubiquitous on television and magazines. He was also Austria's most polarizing figure, with an impact far beyond that country's borders. During a long and checkered career, Haider stood out from the crowd of post-war Austrian politicians with his good looks, athletic lifestyle and devilish talent for provocation. But he was also a populist and demagogue who played...
...Austrians were shocked to wake to the news Saturday. Even political opponents remarked on the huge impact Haider has had on recent Austrian history. Only last month, he had helped Austria's far right mount an unexpected comeback in national elections. The party he led, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, combined with his former party, the Freedom Party, to take 29% of the vote. It was the best showing for Austria's anti-immigrant, anti-Europe right wing since the Second World...
...Haider was born in the province of Upper Austria, but he made his political career in the mostly rural southern province of Carinthia, a mountainous region bordering Italy and Slovenia dotted with turquoise lakes and snow-capped peaks. Both his parents had been early supporters of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Party, which ruled Austria after it was annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938. After the war his father was briefly penalized for his Nazi affiliation and his mother lost her job as a teacher; those bitter consequences, biographers say, helped shape their son's political views. Haider also inherited...
...party's brief flirtation with liberal ideas and strengthening its nationalist roots. Political analysts praised his oratorical skills and manifest charisma as well as his talent for reducing complicated political and economic problems to easily recognized root causes. He espoused anti-immigrant positions and attempted (unsuccessfully) to prevent Austria from joining the European Union in the 1990s. In a country reluctant to acknowledge its role in Nazi atrocities carried out during the Second World War, he also repeatedly hinted that Hitler was not all bad: at one point he said that the Waffen S.S., the unit implicated in some...
...More recently, Haider was seeking to re-invent Austria's far right. In campaigning for this year's national parliamentary elections, he steered clear of Nazi references, focusing instead on the alleged threat posed by immigration, a potent political issue in Austria. His greatest political success came in 1999, when he led the Freedom Party to 27% of the vote, a result that triggered outrage in Europe and, ultimately, sanctions from the European Union when the party was invited to join the government. Haider never held national office himself, preferring instead to work behind the scenes from his post...