It was quite a turn-out at Jörg Haider’s memorial service in Klagenfurt on Saturday. About 25,000 people were there. Among them was Muammer Gaddafi’s son, an old friend of the late Austrian politician. So, too, was Alfred Gusenbauer, Austria’s Social Democratic chancellor, whose presence reminded us all - if we needed reminding - that Haider, to Austrians, was never the polecat that he was to the rest of the world.

Much ink has been spilt on explanations of Haider’s popularity among Austrians. Perhaps it was because his mother and father, like many Austrians before 1945, were devoted Nazis. Perhaps it was because Haider likened the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War to the Nazi extermination of Europe’s Jews.

Perhaps it was because of his hostility to the Slovenian minority in his native province of Carinthia. Perhaps it was because of his campaigns against immigrants in Austria. Or perhaps it was because of his spirited attacks on the European Union.

Especially important, though, was Haider’s assault on the hallowed Austrian spoils system known as “Proporz”. Proporz infested every corner of public life in Austria’s post-war democracy. Every government ministry, every state sector job, every minor post and every perk was allocated to activists and supporters of the Social Democrats and the conservative People’s Party on a proportional basis. It was an intricate, bureaucratically managed patronage system that the great novelist Robert Musil would have recognised as typical of his countrymen’s genius.

When Haider and his far-right Freedom Party denounced Proporz, many Austrians embraced him as an anti-establishment outsider with the potential to destroy a system from which they had not benefited. When he said Proporz had caused the two mainstream parties to lose touch with the people, many Austrians agreed wholeheartedly.

At Saturday’s memorial service, Gusenbauer described Haider as “a man who could leave no one cold, whether in a positive or a negative sense”. There was not a word about how patronage politics, as practised by the Social Democrats and the People’s Party, had contributed to Haider’s rise.

Herbert Gottweis, a political science professor at the University of Vienna, got it absolutely right about Haider. “He simply said what many people in Austria think.”

October 19, 2008 12:03pm in EU | Comment