Haider, Austria's Notorious Far-right Politician, is Killed in Road Crash

Jörg Haider, the populist Austrian politician notorious for his xenophobia and alleged Nazi sympathies, was killed yesterday in a road accident at the age of 58.

Haider, the governor of the Austrian province of Carinthia and leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (AFA), was driving alone near the city of Klagenfurt. He died of severe head and chest injuries after his vehicle veered off the road as he attempted to overtake another car, doctors said.

A spokesman for Haider's party said his death was 'like the end of the world' and pledged to 'keep his legacy alive'. Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer described the maverick right-winger as someone who had shaped his nation's political landscape for decades.

Political analysts said that the sudden death of Haider could lead to a new wave of support for the resurgent but divided Austrian right, which won 28 per cent of the vote in general elections last month. 'The right-wing bloc will now be able to unify around one leader,' said Robert Misik, a senior Austrian journalist and commentator. 'The charismatic Haider died the death of the James Dean of the Austrian political class, and that in itself will have significant consequences in the future.'

Haider, the son of two Austrian Nazi sympathizers and a brilliant law student, was one of Europe's most controversial politicians. He based his career on a relatively explicit admiration for German National Socialism, aggressive Euroscepticism, persistent attacks on immigrants, and an instinctive ability to subtly but effectively tap into a long local history of anti-semitism.

Using simple, provocative language, Haider, along with figures such as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, was seen as one of the pioneers of the new European extreme-right populism of the past two decades. In 1991 he provoked fury after praising the 'orderly employment policy' of Nazi Germany, in 1995 he dismissed Nazi concentration camps as 'the punishment camps of National Socialism', and said that the Nazi Waffen-SS 'deserved every honor and recognition'. Haider's father volunteered for service with German armies on the eastern and western fronts during the Second World War. His parents were punished for their pro-Nazi activities by being forced to work in mundane jobs after the war.

In 1999, after receiving 27 per cent of the vote in national elections, Haider's Freedom party was included in national government, earning Austria months of diplomatic isolation within the European Union. However, Haider, who always preferred the role of maverick populist outside the mainstream than the grit of day-to-day politics, ceded leadership of his party to a deputy. 'When it actually came to the final and boldest step into real power, his courage failed him,' said Misik. 'He was a complex personality, eccentric and borderline.'

A multi-millionaire following the death of a rich landowner uncle who bequeathed him a huge estate controversially bought from an Italian Jew forced to flee Austria in 1940, Haider, always very popular in his home province of Carinthia, had toned down his rhetoric in recent years - though recent election posters in the town of Graz featured an immigrant beggar woman and the title 'Clean Up Graz'.

In 2005 he broke away from the hard-right Freedom party, now led by his former protégé Heinz-Christian Strache, to create the more moderate AFA. Despite the personal animosity of Haider and Strache, their two parties formed a right-wing bloc which did well in Austrian general elections last month, winning the same total as local Social Democrats.

Strache, who has called for a ministry of deportation of immigrants, openly mocks homosexuals and has been filmed in forests carrying arms and wearing paramilitary fatigues in the company of banned German neo-Nazis, ran a virulently xenophobic campaign with slogans such as 'lights home for asylum cheats'. Yesterday Strache said Haider's death had deprived Austria of 'a great political figure'.