Leaked memo reveals how EU courted Haider

By Stephen Castle in Brussels

18 February 2000

Brussels faced new embarrassment over Jörg Haider yesterday when a top official had to defend a report in which he described Austria's far right party leader as "charismatic, even fascinating".

Corrado Pirzio-Biroli, now the senior aide to Austria's European commissioner Franz Fischler, made the reference in a letter written when he was the EU's ambassador to Vienna seven years ago.

The document resurfaced yesterday as Mr Haider made fresh headlines, dashing his coalition partners' hopes that he would keep a low profile in Carinthia where he is governor.

On an unannounced trip to Canada, Mr Haider, who is notorious for his praise of Nazi employment policies and SS veterans, unsuccessfully tried to visit Montreal's Holocaust Centre.

The president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Moshe Ronen, said the museum rejected what he described as a bizarre request. He denounced Mr Haider as a "cynical manipulator of public opinion" who carried the legacy of Hitler "wherever he goes".

Mr Pirzio-Biroli's letter shows the extent to which Brussels tried to court Mr Haider in the run-up to Austria's accession to the EU, which his right-wing Freedom Party then opposed.

But it paints a muddied picture of Mr Haider, arguing that he has "an enormous ego", is "unpredictable" and "follows alternatively the dictates of the right and left lobes of his brain".

Dated February 1993, the confidential report followed a meeting with Mr Haider at which the controversial politician was invited to lunch with the ambassador and given a Euro-Austrian flag pin.

Mr Pirzio-Biroli stressed his common ground with Mr Haider, telling him that he "agreed with his approach of a European entity which, far from being a superstate, would be characterised by maximum decentralisation".

"No doubt, he is charismatic, even fascinating," his letter argues. "In private he is moderate, statesmanlike and articulate. In public he is brilliant, but tends towards hyperbolic populism. This could still carry him further but could also be his undoing."

Mr Pirzio-Biroli, ambassador to Vienna for two years from 1992, yesterday defended his description, saying that, read in its entirety, the letter did not give a positive impression of Mr Haider.

He also argued that the contact with Mr Haider was legitimate. "I felt that, as ambassador, one has to avoid taking sides in a country," he said. "As I was active on the circuit I had to avoid being accused of privileging one side."

Much of the discussion reported in the letter centred on the Freedom Party's policy on entry into the EU, which it had once supported.

Mr Pirzio-Biroli has anti-fascist credentials, his father having been hanged by the Nazis. "I despise any anti-democratic or racial statements," he said. "The government [in Vienna] was right to keep him out of office."

The emergence of the letter highlighted the difficulties of dealing with Mr Haider, whose electoral success led to the suspension of bilateral political ties between Austria and 14 EU member states.

Despite these sanctions the European Commissionannounced yesterday that the Austrian President, Thomas Klestil, is to visit Brussels next month.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2000-02/haider180200.shtml