Vienna. -- The cameras are rolling and the pens are scribbling, all because the --ing man who aspires to be chancellor of Austria, Joerg Haider, has at last moved onto his most popular subject.
It's time to bash some foreigners.
"A Lebanese man convicted 50 times for breaking and entering and other offenses wasn't supposed to re-enter Austria until the year 2047," Mr. Haider says, "but he keeps coming back. There was a Bulgarian caught red-handed, and yet he still receives social benefits. . . . A Romanian who was convicted gets a computer and 40,000 Austrian schillings [about $3,600] in public funds."
Mr. Haider goes on like this for several minutes, cruising through a catalog of offending nationalities as if reading a 10 Most Wanted List. This kind of talk, along with his lean good looks, have led some critics to call him the David Duke of Austria.
But to liken the 43-year-old Mr. Haider to the U.S. Klansman-turned-politician is to underrate his complexity and appeal. In shaping a new style of right-wing populism -- an anti-establishment pitch often closer to Ross Perot than Mr. Duke -- Mr. Haider has found a way to succeed in Austria even as his political kin of the German right wing continue to founder.
At the moment he is on track to meet his goal to become chancellor by 1998.
With national elections approaching in October for Germany and Austria, Germany's largest right-radical Republicans Party remains stalled below 5 percent in national opinion polls and recent regional elections.
In Austria, Mr. Haider's more refined xenophobia is cresting beyond the 17 percent his party gained in the last national elections.
The latest surge came last month, in parliamentary elections for three of Austria's nine states. Mr. Haider's Freedom Party won 27 of the 108 open seats, and in his home state of Carinthia the party took 33 percent of the vote.
Also on the rise in Austria is violence by right-radical and neo-Nazi thugs, which in some ways has assumed a more threatening tone than in Germany, as attested by a recent round of letter bombs to prominent Austrians.
Mr. Haider's critics say his rhetoric only incites such behavior. Mr. Haider responds by condemning the violence and saying that he has again been misunderstood. Economic problems caused by immigration that have stirred violence, not his rhetoric, he says.
Mr. Haider has acquired some defenders in some unlikely corners. One is Manfred Brunner, the former Christian Democratic politician from Germany who has started his own Perot-style political movement in opposition to Germany's ruling parties.
Mr. Brunner, backed by a small but impressive group of intellectuals and business people, has raised eyebrows by praising Mr. Haider. But he has not backed down. He says Mr. Haider's only sin has been in breaking several post-World War II taboos on political discourse.
"Reforms from the right are just not 'politically correct' anywhere in Europe," Mr. Brunner says. "At least in Germany and Austria, topics like immigration, national identity and refugees may not be touched outside of the left-wing discourse. . . . The Freedom Party people are no Nazis; rather they are successors of certain fighters in the 1848 movement of national-liberal citizens. The case of Haider is a typical example of witch hunting: He is a convincing and convinced democrat, but he won't subordinate to left-wing taboos. He breaks them. Thus, he is damned by all those people."
But why must Mr. Haider keep making such a big issue out of foreigners? In the United States, political analysts might say he was simply "pushing a hot button" -- gaining votes on the cheap by stirring gut-level emotions on volatile matters.
Mr. Haider once said, "The multicultural society is a fiction that cannot work," and that seems to be the basis of his strong beliefs on immigration issues.
"There's not one society all over the world where this concept [of multiculturalism] works, especially if we look toward the U.S.A.," he says during an interview in his Vienna office. "What happens when different cultures live together is that ghettos and isolation different ethnic groups arise. The results are social problems -- slums, crimes. The recent Los Angeles riots are a warning example that a multicultural society cannot work out."
Immigrants who strive to assimilate into the host culture are fine, he says, provided that one doesn't let in too many at once and discourage assimilation. Or provided that one doesn't allow immigrants who might not assimilate at all, such as fundamentalist Muslims.
Austrians have said overwhelmingly in opinion polls that they don't want any more immigrants. After decades in which immigration was never a problem, tens of thousands moved to the country from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the beginning of the war in the former Yugoslavia. The recession has made it harder than it might have been to absorb the newcomers, which makes Mr. Haider's remarks hit home when he talks about taxpayer-paid benefits received by immigrants.
Feeling pressured by the growing Freedom Party, the government has already tightened border security and limited entries, but Mr. Haider wants tougher measures. He favors a temporary halt of all immigration until illegal aliens are deported. He also backs a proposal to limit foreign students to no more than 30 percent of any school class.
Such matters tend to obscure Mr. Haider's Perot-type broadsides against Austria's two old-line political parties, the People's Party and the Social Democrats. As he speaks of leadership gridlock, the corruption of money and the incestuous relationships of the national power structure, one half expects him to sprout big ears and start drawling in Texan.
"The People's Party and the Socialists own a 50 percent share of the National Bank," he says. "The parties are interested in these shares because they get millions out of the foreign exchange transactions. Now, for the first time a politician like me appears who points out these grievances, who shows them and says we have to change this. . . . That's why I am the enemy of the controlling political system. If I agreed to gain money from the National Bank for my party, I would be the partner and friend of the established parties."
But Mr. Haider hasn't helped himself with slips such as the one he made in June 1992, when he praised the "orderly" World War II-era employment program of the Nazis as being better than the current Austrian system. He was stripped of his governorship of Carinthia as a result, although the episode never seemed to hurt him at the polls.
Three months ago some of the Freedom Party's more liberal old guard revolted against Mr. Haider, and quit under the leadership of Heide Schmidt, the party vice chairwoman. They formed their own party, the Liberal Forum, and set out to cut into Mr. Haider's base of voters.
But the new group drew no more than 5.8 percent in any of the three states voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The new party also couldn't keep the Freedom Party from gaining in all three states.
As Mr. Haider looks ahead, he envisions drawing further support away from the People's Party and the Social Democrats, until the Freedom Party is strong enough to replace one of the parties in the governing coalition. His electoral strength comes mostly from younger voters, he says, meaning that he's ripe to become chancellor after the national elections in 1998.
Dan Fesperman is a foreign correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, based in Berlin.