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Joerg Haider, whose praise of Hitler and anti-foreigner rhetoric helped fuel the meteoric rise of his party into government two years ago, said early Tuesday that he would stay in office despite his party’s disastrous showing in general elections.
Haider, head of the Freedom Party and a provincial governor, said others in his party persuaded him to stay.
Haider’s flashes of pro-Nazi sentiment and flamboyant exposes of corruption in other parties brought his Freedom Party from obscurity in the mid-1980s to unprecedented strength–it joined the present government coalition after coming in second in 1999 elections. But the same confrontational streak that attracted voters to Haider proved his party’s undoing in Sunday’s general election.
