IS HE ANOTHER HITLER?

In the week that Austria became the pariah of the western world, what is the truth about the man being dubbed a neo-Nazi...

Daily Mail, SATURDAY DISPATCH from Stephen Glover in Vienna, Austria

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany and leader of a coalition government. His party had recently won just 33 pc of the vote. President Hindenberg and many others believed that they could control Hitler. They could not.

Yesterday at midday Jörg Haider's far-Right Freedom Party was sworn into power in Austria with 27pc of the vote. His moderate coalition partner -and the new Chancellor-is Wolfgang Schüssel of the conservatively-inclined People's Party. Mr Schüssel is certain that he can control Mr Haider, whom he believes is no neo-Nazi. Time will tell whether he is right.

History is a forbidding guide. We ignore its lessons at our peril, and yet it never exactly repeats itself. Is Jörg Haider potentially even a minor Hitler who, beneath that bronzed smile, harbours dark thoughts and evil plans? Or is he merely another Right-wing populist who will fizzle out once the Austrians have seen how lightweight and shallow he really is?

EUROPEAN leaders fear the former, and with history pressing at their backs they threaten diplomatic sanctions against Austria. But this interference in the affairs of a sovereign state is a dangerous game that has irked many Austrians. A few weeks ago, polls suggested that Mr Haider's support was flagging. Now they tell us that if an election were held tomorrow he might get 33pc of the vote, and his party could be the largest.

Of Mr Haider's ambitions there can be no doubt-he has said he wants to be Chancellor of Austria. He has decided against a job in the new government, but his grip on his party is absolute, and so the six Freedom Party ministers win dance to his music. As of noon yesterday, Mr Haider is the second most powerful man in Austria. Before long, he may be the first.

He was born in 1950. His father, a shoemaker' was a former petty Nazi official, his mother a one-time member of Hitler's League of German Maidens. As a young man, he became a wealthy lawyer and inherited a 3,700-acre estate from a relative. This had been stolen from a Jewish family before the war but inquiries have established that compensation was paid after 1945.

As a charismatic and dynamic man - a colourful, almost exotic creature in a world of grey consensual politics -Haider achieved extraordinary success, taking over the Freedom Party in 1986. It is descended from the pan-German, anti-Slav and anti-clerical liberal movements of the l9th century which have little in common with liberalism as understood in Britain.

By the mid-1980s the party had shifted to the Left, but Haider took it back closer to its roots championing privatisation and

opposing the corporatist and corrupt state that, since the early Seventies, has been mostly governed by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the People's Party - now Mr Haider's partners.

Jörg Haider's reputation as an extremist rests principally on a few spine-chilling statements that are recycled repeatedly in the media: A nostalgic word of praise for the Waffen SS in front of veterans; the description of Hitler's employment policies as 'orderly', and, once, the use of the term 'punishment camp' to describe concentration camps -implying that their inmates had been guilty of crimes.

Haider's technique is either to deny ever saying what is attributed to him-as he denied recently having described Churchill as one of the three worst leaders of the 20th century -or to apologise and say he was misunderstood. These shameful fragments may be part of some as yet undisclosed belief system, a mound of hate and prejudice. Or they may be mere titbits thrown to a susceptible older electorate that has not wholly come to terms with Austria's murky past in the Third Reich.

But although you might not

believe it, to judge by much of the media coverage this week Jörg Haider's expressed views are not particularly controversial. Israel may have recalled its ambassador in horror at the inclusion of Haider's party in government, but-contrary to widespread misconceptions- he has never made any specific anti-Semitic remarks. Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter has conceded this, and has said that he doesn't believe that Haider is an anti-Semite. Haider, however, is against further immigration to Austria, as are the rival Social Democratic Party and the People's Party.

HE CERTAINLY does not behave as a Nazi. There are no storm troopers, no bullyboys. The young Raider party workers whom I met in a pub in the working class area of Kagran, a suburb of Vienna, were polite and well-dressed. Nothing they said would have raised an eyebrow at a Tory Party conference, or even a Labour one. Indeed these smart-suited, slightly serious young men would not have seemed or sounded out of place at Labour headquarters in Millbank.

Haider's political manifesto is mainstream, if unpalatable to some. He claims his views on the family and law and order are close to those of Tony Blair. He is pro-Nato and against European Union enlargement though not anti-EU. (In fact, he has dropped his opposition to enlargement as a concession for joining up with Wolfgang Schüssel's People's Party.) Above all, he is anti-corruption, and a scourge of the longserving Left-Right coalition that carved up the political spoils for itself.

The platform agreed by Mr Haider's Freedom Party and Mr Schüssel has few, if any, controversial elements. The two men even signed 'a declaration of European values' at the Hofburg, the imperial place from which the Hapsburgs once ruled their great empire. At the press conference after cards, Mr Raider was at pains to demonstrate how moderate he is and, in answer to a question about his alleged Nazi sympathies, he spoke pointedly about 'the dark period of National Socialism'.

Here was a man, to judge by his insistent repeated claims of moderation, who would sit happily in almost any Right-of-Centre European political party. And yet there was some quality about him that I found disturbing. He stood by a sort of lectern which he occasionally gripped with his hands, dressed in a black suit with a white shirt and black tie. His face was, as

always, bronzed from his trusty sun bed, and his hair fitted so tightly to his scalp that one might have suspected that he was wearing a wig if one did not know better.

There is something slightly effeminate about his ski-instructor looks. (Perhaps it is this that has encouraged some unscrupulous political opponents to smear him as a homosexual, though he is reportedly happily married and has two children.)

Whenever Mr Schüssel answered a question-he is a waffly comfy, rather rumpled sort of chap- Mr Haider's eyes darted around the room in a snake-like way. From time to time he gave a thin-lipped half-smile that chilled the blood a little.

Indeed, there was a still tenseness about him that would have made him stand out in a crowd of 10,000, a sense of controlled energy, and perhaps of suppressed anger, which he was finding an effort, albeit a bearable one, to control. Looking at him, it was quite easy to imagine such a man from time to time exploding with vile thoughts that conflict with his carefully cultivated image of sweet reasonableness.

Perhaps I am seeing too much. One cannot condemn a man for his looks. That is the problem with Jörg Haider. There is no Mein Kampf, no preposterous world view, no barmy speeches inveighing against Jews; only these occasional and alarming eruptions about the past. Yet my impression was of a man so utterly different from all the democratic politicians I've ever encountered, and if has left me troubled.

He is obviously a crude populist but no one can be sure that he is worse

than that. He may be. The mistake of European leaders is to assume, on insufficient evidence, that he is. If he really were a Hitler, would we object to their threats against a sovereign state? I don't think so. It is because there is no evidence that he is- indeed, on the evidence of his policies, he is not-that the European, as well as the American, reactions seem excessive.

According to some reports, the outgoing social democratic Chancellor Viktor Klima, persuaded other European leaders at recent meetings in Helsinki and Stockholm to blackball Mr Haider. Two countries with the largest far-Right groups-France and Belgium-have raised the loudest hue and cry, presumably because they don't want Mr Haider's success to legitimise their probably more extreme home-grown varieties of neo-fascists. By way of reply, Mr Haider described President Chirac as a 'failure,' and the Belgian government as 'corrupt'-two unarguable propositions that, nonetheless, suggest a man who can lose control of himself.

MUCH European reaction was self-interested: let it not happen there so it may not happen here. Now that it has happened in Austria it would be counterproductive to tighten the screw further. Suggestions by the Belgian government that people should boycott Austrian ski resorts are frankly, ludicrous. They play in the hands of Jörg Haider, who thrives on confrontation.

He knows he can manipulate the widespread resentment in Austria caused by European bullying. There is a core of extreme opinion here that is naturally Xenophobia as well as anti-Semitic. Austria was largely exonerated by the Allies for its complicity in the war, and this is perhaps why some sections of Austrian society have never entirely shaken off their Nazi past. When President Kurt Waldheim was pronounced persona non grata during the Eighties on account of his Nazi past, his popularity in Austria increased.

But even many non-Haider supporters are outraged by what they regard as unwarranted interference in their internal affairs. Watching the demonstrators outside President Thomas Klestil's office in the Hofburg -it was he who reluctantly rubberstamped the new coalition-the policy of ostracising this little country seems all the more absurd. Plenty of people here don't approve of Haider; many others are unsure. All of them will Judge for themselves. Until the next election in four years, he is bound hand and foot by the agreements he has made.

It is possible that one day Haider may try to consume his coalition partner Wolfgang Schüssel-as Hitler gobbled up his conservative allies. Mr Schüssel may unwittingly be playing President Hindenberg to Haider's Hitler. But it seems much more likely that the experience of government will demonstrate that the Freedom Party has no magic formula, and that it is as fallible as any other. Even now it inspires hope rather than fervour among its supporters.

Let's wait and see, and keep our heads. Europe must give Austria a chance. History does not repeat itself. Unlike Germany in 1933, Austria is prosperous, and has low unemployment and almost no inflation. Immigration has already been virtually stopped, and if so-called asylum seekers (there were 42,000 last year) still present a problem, as in several other European countries, it is surely one that can be dealt with. Haider is a man of these times- and Austrians do not want another Hitler. ======================================== Daily Mail, Saturday, February 5th, 2000