VIENNA DIARY:Three months on the BZÖ party remains firmly bound to its dead founder's memory, writes DEREK SCALLY
ANYONE WONDERING how Austria’s extreme right would cope with Jörg Haider’s death in October got a few clues this week.
The man of the moment is Gerhard Dörfler, a 55-year-old banker and brewer who has served as governor of the state of Carinthia since the car Haider was driving crashed off the road near his home at twice the speed limit.
With regional elections looming in March, Dörfler has so far failed to match his predecessor’s unique, acidic qualities – not that he hasn’t been trying.
Earlier this week Dörfler announced that his party, the Alliance for Austria’s Future (BZÖ), would spend €40,000 to purchase what remains of the Volkswagen Phaeton wrecked by Haider.
The car will be kept in storage, said Dörfler, “until all questions about Haider’s death have been clarified”.
Police say they have no further questions about the Haider death: a second autopsy requested by Haider’s widow reportedly reached the same conclusion as the first, that the populist politician was well over the legal alcohol limit.
But Dörfler says he is motivated by posterity, citing parallels to evidence secured after the assassination of president John F Kennedy.
The plan is an indication of how, three months on, the BZÖ remains firmly bound to its dead founder’s memory.
Created after Haider split with the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in 2005, the BZÖ finished last autumn’s general election with 11 per cent support.
It was a result due almost entirely to Haider’s forceful personality and his huge popularity among voters in Carinthia and other rural areas.
In the March regional election, the BZÖ is likely to be returned to power once again in the Carinthian state government with more than 40 per cent support.
But some observers see in Dörfler a leader riding the Haider sympathy wave without any ideas to secure the party’s long-term future.
Instead, as the rest of the world celebrated America's first African-American president, Dörfler shocked an Austrian television audience by telling a " Neger" joke in front of a leading black entertainer.
The joke – involving two nursing mothers, black and white, and the white mother’s baby asking for the other woman’s “cocoa” – was greeted with complete silence.
A frustrated Dörfler said later that the audience didn’t laugh because he “told the joke badly”. Even in a party used to Haider’s praise for Hitler’s economic policies, some think Dörfler went a little too far.
Unlike Haider, the current governor is far from a universally liked figure in the party that worked quickly to sideline Haider’s chosen successor, Jörg Petzner.
The 28-year-old, who began his career in 2004 as Haider’s personal spokesman, attracted much attention – positive and negative – for his very public displays of grief at Haider’s funeral.
Two weeks after Haider’s death, Petzner said in a radio interview that the two men “had a relationship that went far beyond friendship”.
“Jörg and I were connected by something truly special. He was the man of my life,” he said.
BZÖ leaders, alarmed at how their largely rural voters would react to their late, sainted leader’s apparent secret gay life, kicked Petzner into the back benches, where he bides his time.
While the BZÖ struggles with the post-Haider vacuum, their old colleagues in the FPÖ are optimistic that they can win back Haider voters once the sympathy factor has evaporated.
Failing that, the two populist parties may eventually merge, making far-right populists the second-largest political grouping in the Austrian parliament.
There are no shortage of Haider-school politicians in the FPÖ, such as Susanne Winter, an MP for Graz convicted yesterday of incitement to hatred over anti-Muslim remarks.
She provoked uproar a year ago for suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad wrote the Koran “during epileptic fits” and would be classed today as a “child abuser for marrying a six-year-old girl”.
The 51-year-old politician suggested setting up an “animal brothel” in a Graz park “so that Muslim men can go there instead of grabbing young girls”.
Warming to her topic, she warned of a “Muslim tsunami” heading towards Europe and suggested “flinging Islam back where it belongs, beyond the Mediterranean”.
She appeared in court yesterday carrying a lily – “the flower of innocence”, she said – suggesting she wanted to “point out problems, not insult anyone”.
The court was not impressed with her arguments and handed down a three-month suspended sentence and a fine of €24,000.
Haider may be gone, but his hate-filled legacy lives on, prompting many Austrian newspapers this week to ask a question familiar to Irish ears: just how far does a politician have to go to be forced to resign?