Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

Haider’s influence peaked at the very end of the century, in the wake of the elections of October 1999 when his party received the backing of 27 percent of Austria’s voters: pushing the People’s Party into third place and coming within 290,000 votes of the first-place Socialists. In February 2000, to somewhat exaggerated gasps of horror from Austria’s European partners, the People’s Party formed a coalition government with the Freedom Party (though not including Haider himself). But the new Austrian Chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, had made a shrewd calculation: the Freedom Party was a movement of protest, an anti-‘them’ party that appealed to ‘the ripped-off, lied-to little people’ (to quote Pierre Poujade, the eponymous populist prototype). Once in government, exposed to the wear and tear of office and constrained to share responsibility for unpopular policies, it would soon lose its appeal. In the elections of 2002 the FP scored just 10.1 percent (while the People’s Party had risen to nearly 43 percent). In the European elections of 2004 Haider’s party was reduced to 6.4 percent of the vote. The rise and decline of Haider (who remained nevertheless a popular governor of his native Carinthia) was emblematic of the trajectory of anti-foreigner parties elsewhere. After winning 17 percent of the vote in 2002, in the wake of its leader’s assassination, the List Pim Fortuyn rose briefly into the ranks of Dutch government only to see its support collapse to just 5 percent at the...