THE WIDOW of Jörg Haider has denied “disrespectful” claims that her husband was homosexual or that he was drunk or speeding at the time of his fatal car crash in October.
Claudia Haider said that, had the speculation about her husband’s sexuality been true, she would have divorced him years ago.
“My husband was not homosexual,” she told Germany’s Bunte magazine.
“Jörg and I used to laugh about these rumours. He always defended himself very well.”
Mrs Haider said she was upset by “posthumous over-the-top interpretations” of her husband’s life, “now that he can no longer defend himself”.
Rumours about Mr Haider’s sexuality accompanied him throughout his career as Austria’s leading extreme-right politician.
If they were true, Mrs Haider said, a “compromising photograph” would have eventually turned up – which, she says, never happened.
Married for 32 years with two daughters, Mr Haider (58) projected a public image of a marathon-running family man.
In political life, his inner circle was populated almost exclusively by young men and he was a regular visitor to gay bars in Vienna and Klagenfurt.
Hours before his death, Mr Haider was photographed in Stadtkrämer, a gay club in Klagenfurt, with an unidentified man and an empty bottle of vodka.
“Women go to this establishment. Whether it is a homosexual bar, I don’t know,” said Mrs Haider. “That’s not what I hear in Klagenfurt. It’s a bar that’s always open.” She disputed police information that her husband was speeding and three times over the legal blood alcohol limit.
Whether her husband was drunk “had yet to be fully answered”, she said.
The stretch of mountain road where the crash happened was, she said, “too short to accelerate to 140km/h”.
Two weeks after Mr Haider’s death, political ally Stefan Petzner (27) said in an interview that he had a “truly special” relationship with the politician.
“We had a relationship that went far beyond friendship,” said Mr Petzner, describing the dead politician as his “Lebensmensch”, or the person of his life.
Mrs Haider was aware of the relationship, he said, and did not object.
Mr Haider’s political party, however, did object and demoted Mr Petzner, who had been groomed by Mr Haider as his successor to head the far-right Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ).