Some 25,000 people attended his funeral, countless books have been written about him, a bridge was named in his honour and now the spectre of Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider is dominating a regional election in Austria.

“A campaign with the tragically deceased Haider”; “A dead man is spearheading us”; “And above all, the spectre of Joerg Haider” read newspaper headlines.

(Photo: Joerg Haider, May 10, 2005 /Miro Kuzmanovic)

Both of Austria’s far-right parties are staking their claim to Haider’s legacy in an election in the Alpine Province of Carinthia where he was governor for more than a decade.

“Carinthia is going HIS way,” proclaim the posters of Haider’s former Freedom Party. Freedom says Haider achieved his greatest successes when heading the party.

“We will look after your Carinthia,” echo the posters of Alliance for Austria’s Future, the splinter party that Haider set up in 2005 after internal disputes within Freedom.

Both parties, which mopped up a third of the vote between them in Austria’s recent parliamentary election, recognise the mileage still to be had out of Haider’s success.

The populist leader, who led the right into a coalition government from 2000-2006, was one of Austria’s rare internationally recognised public figures.

Austria went into mourning when Haider died four months ago in a high-speed car crash, and leaders of all political colours turned up for his funeral.

(Photo:A photo of Joerg Haider stands in the St. Stephens Cathedral during a memorial service in Vienna, Oct 15, 2008/Leonhard Foeger)

“People have the impression that, through Haider, they became a force to be reckoned with in the world,” Klaus Ottomeyer, professor of psychology at the university of Klagenfurt, told Reuters.

Ottomeyer, who will publish a book in March about the making of the Haider myth, said the Carinthians have glorified their former governor as benevolent father figure, Robin Hood or even a patron saint.

This may baffle outsiders, who are mostly familiar with Haider’s blunt anti-immigrant rhetoric and verbal gaffes. His notoriety peaked in the 1990s when he cited “the proper labour policies” of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich and referred to concentration camps as “penal camps” in a parliamentary debate.

But for all the far-right’s bickering over the claim to Haider’s legacy, it may be time to move on and find a new hero.

Political researcher Guenther Ogris said the Haider cult was beginning to fade, and Carinthians were turning their focus elsewhere.

“At the end of the day, the economic crisis is now the main thing on people’s minds — that is emotionally more important than the dead governor.”

He may have died in a car crash last month whilst drunk, but Austrian rightist Joerg Haider is not gone.

Haider, who was enmeshed in nearly every part of Austrian political life, is now being hailed for his efforts to help two Austrian hostages being held in the Sahara months before his death.

According to a newly-published e-mail, Haider asked the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in March for help in freeing Andrea Kloiber and Wolfgang Ebner, who disappeared in February while on holiday in Tunisia. They are believed to have been held by al Qaeda’s North African wing.

The hostages were released last week, several months after Haider wrote to his close friend Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The Austrian Foreign Ministry said Libya only helped in initial negotiations but not the eventual release.

Whether Haider’s contribution was decisive or not, the news has only added to his image as a “hero of the people”.

The daily Oesterreich, which printed extracts from the e-mail, has already published a DVD of Haider’s life and romantic images of him dressed in traditional Austrian costume, looking out over the mountains of Carinthia, where he was provincial governor. Some 25,000 people attended his memorial service in Klagenfurt last month.

Many did not seem to think his divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric was much of an issue and were fiercely loyal towards Haider, one of Austria’s few internationally recognised figures.

Even Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, a Social Democrat who openly opposed many of Haider’s views, has admitted that his opponent had enormous ability to reach out to people.

 Now that Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider is dead, the German, British and U.S. press are eagerly spilling the beans on his “secret double life”, saying that he had a male lover.

 Just when you thought his story couldn’t get more dramatic — he died on Oct. 11 in a high-speed car crash while drunk — we now learn that Haider, who was married with two daughters, was not only a populist who polarised the public with remarks about Nazism and immigrants, but might have been gay too.

 But wait a minute. Speculation about Haider’s sexuality is not at all new, at least not in Austria. Here, his death has not really led to breathless speculation about his private life as it has elsewhere.

 Why not?

 Questions about Haider’s sexuality had been asked in Austria since the 1990s, when the charismatic, folksy leader surrounded himself with a group of young and successful male followers, earning his entourage the nickname “The Boys Posse”.

 Far-right parties have never been especially women-friendly anyway.  Haider never said he was gay, nor denied it and Austrians’ reaction to this is interesting. They don’t really care. Whether true or not, this speculation was largely politely ignored or deemed not newsworthy.

 Overall the Austrian press abides by the unwritten rule that private lives should only be written about when made an issue by the politician themselves, or has an effect on public policy.

 ”If Haider was gay or bi or whatever, so what?” writes Marco Schreuder, an openly gay member of the Vienna regional assembly. ”In our society, diverse sexual tendencies should be an accepted as a fact by enlightened, 21st century people…Drinkdriving is life-threatening. But visiting a gay bar doesn’t
threaten your own life or anyone else’s”.

 Haider’s political parties — far-right Freedom before 2005 and later the splinter group Alliance for Austria’s Future, did not pursue anti-gay policies.

 Question marks over Haider’s sexuality were not a political issue and are not new. Should we care nevertheless?