JORG HAIDER:Jorg Haider, the Austrian far-right leader who redrew the map of Austrian and European politics and set the agenda for the xenophobia and demagoguery of the extreme right across the continent, has died at the age of 58.
He was killed in a car crash in the early hours of last Saturday while driving alone in southern Austria. He was on his way to a family reunion when, almost four times over the legal alcohol limit, according to subsequent reports in Austria, he overtook another vehicle and hit a concrete barrier at 142km/h, twice the speed limit.
Haider leaves a political legacy of iconoclastic triumph. He shattered the cosy, corrupt world of post-war politics in the country and became the model for the rise of neo-fascism across Europe.
Between 1986 and 1999, he increased the vote for his Freedom Party (FP) in every election, climaxing in 1999 when the FP became the number two party in Austria and entered government.
In elections three weeks ago, the far right, now split into two, took an enormous 29 per cent, again coming second, with the support of almost half of Austrians under 30. The breakaway party led by Haider, the Movement for Austria's Future, came from nowhere to take 11 per cent, bringing the leader to compare himself to Lazarus.
His death deprives Austria of its most charismatic, effective and intriguing politician, a figure who mesmerised and repelled the country for 22 years. Clever, wealthy and narcissistic, he cultivated a role as agent provocateur.
Haider toyed with Austrian nostalgia for the Third Reich, attacked the European Union, hammered the two big parties, fanned anti-immigrant hysteria and spearheaded a campaign based on anti-Islamic bigotry.
He took a right-wing rump of elderly Nazi apologists and young men with a penchant for violence and paramilitarism and transformed it into a modern popular force - from sullen skinheads to permatanned ski instructors.
Haider's father Robert was a cobbler and Nazi storm-trooper. His mother Dorothea was local leader of the Nazi League of German Maidens.
At 20 Haider was leader of the youth movement of the FP. By 29, he had become the country's youngest MP. In 1989, he became the governor of the southern province of Carinthia, an area that was the source of his immense wealth: an uncle left him a vast estate, said to have been bought at a knockdown price from a Jewish family fleeing Austria in 1940.
Haider nudged and winked at the unrepentant fascists. He told a gathering of SS veterans they were "people of character true to their convictions". "At least in the Third Reich they had decent employment policies," he said once.
In 1995 he referred to concentration camps as "penal camps". By the mid-1990s he had switched to euro-scepticism and attacking Germany and the EU as a threat to everything from Austrian identity to the purity of its drinking water.
Haider was a contrarian. He drummed up anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim prejudice but when the mainstream parties opposed Turkey joining the EU, he supported the Turks. When the west was preparing for war in Iraq, he went to Baghdad to shake Saddam Hussein's hand. Haider's most effective campaigning was against the establishment parties, mining a rich seam of discontent.
The system was vulnerable to a Haider, which was why he represented a greater threat to the mainstream parties than his far-right equivalents elsewhere.
The great ambition was to be chancellor, but protest suited him better than power. Too much the mercurial maverick, radical and self-absorbed, Haider instead became the model for others.
His wife, Claudia, and two daughters survive him.
Jorg Haider: born January 26th, 1950; died October 11th, 2008