Austrian firebrand Joerg Haider said yesterday that he is prepared to return to the helm of the anti-immigration Freedom Party, once Europe’s most successful far-right party, to rescue it from collapse.
Earlier this week, Haider and his sister, Ursula Haubner, the party’s new chief, announced they would purge right-wing extremists and internal critics to try to revitalise the party, whose popularity has plummeted in recent years.

If they succeed in revamping the Freedom Party, Haider’s return to the post of party chairman “would probably also take place”, Haider told Austrian radio in an interview.

“It is the existence (of the party) that is at stake and I am certainly not going to stand by and watch,” he said. “I am convinced what is needed is something like a new Freedom Party.”

The Freedom Party is the third of four main political parties in Austria but is the junior coalition partner in the centre-right ruling coalition with Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel’s conservatives.
Haider set two conditions on his return to the post of party chairman. First, Freedom’s leadership must be united. Secondly, he would have to have “sufficient authority to take radical steps inside the party until 2006”.

“I will once again organise a battle-ready group across Austria,” Haider said.

Only a minority of the Freedom Party members would oppose Haider’s comeback, analysts say.

Haider stepped down as chairman in 2000 but remains its most influential figure, a tough-talking populist who led the party over a decade from the margins into government by nearly tripling its vote to 27% in a parliamentary election in 1999.

In that time, he drew international condemnation for praising Nazi employment policies and Adolf Hitler’s Waffen SS, for which he later apologised.

Since Haider’s departure, the party has staggered from one heavy loss to another in 11 of 12 national, regional and European elections as it repeatedly changed policies and leaders.
It lost nearly two-thirds of its support in the following national ballot in 2002 to win just 10%.

PHOTO CAPTION

Former leader of the right-wing Freedom Party and governor of Austria's southern province of Carinthia Joerg Haider smiles during a press conference in Vienna, on Wednesday, March 9, 2005. (AP)