Jörg Haider: Encyclopedia II - Jörg Haider - Carinthia

Jörg Haider - Carinthia

Jörg Haider - Bärental

Haider has throughout his career concentrated his politics on Carinthia. In addition, Haider's personal life is heavily connected with this part of Austria: Haider became wealthy when he inherited the estate of his uncle Wilhelm Webhofer in 1983, who had owned a large parcel of land in Carinthia commonly known as 'Bärental' (valley of the bears). This estate has a history that came up in the 1990s in the Austrian media. The land had been owned by an Italian Jew until 1941. At that point of time the Nazis still hesitated to take possession of "Jewish property" owned by non-German nationals without any compensation. Thus when the estate was "sold" in 1941, Haider's great-uncle Josef Webhofer (a resident of South Tyrol, Italy) paid 300,000 Reichsmark (about 1.5 million dollars today) to obtain title to the land, only a fraction of its real value. After the war Mathilde Ruifer, the widow of the former Jewish owner of Bärental demanded compensation and was paid an additional 850.000 Schillings (around 400.000 dollars today). In 1955 Josef Webhofer's son Wilhelm Webhofer inherited the estate and later bequested it to Jörg Haider. The land is estimated at about 15 million dollars today. [8]

Jörg Haider - Political struggle in Carinthia

Until 1989, the socialist/Social-democratic party SPÖ had held an absolute majority in the Austrian province of Carinthia; when it received less than 50% of seats in 1989, ÖVP and FPÖ formed a coalition and elected Haider as governor of Carinthia.

In 1991, in a debate in the regional parliament, a speaker attacked Haider's plan of reducing unemployment payments for people seen as "freeloaders", calling it forced work placement remniscent of Nazi policies. Haider replied, "It would not be like the Third Reich, because the Third Reich had a proper employment policy, which your government in Vienna has been unable to accomplish." The remark caused an uproar, Haider had to resign his governor post, and the FPÖ-ÖVP coalition was replaced by an SPÖ-ÖVP coalition.

In 1999, Haider again was elected governor of Carinthia by the Carinthian parliament, where the FPÖ now held a plurality of more than 42%. Even after the FPÖ fell to only 10% from 27% in the national elections in 2002, Haider's support in Carinthia did not diminish and he succeeded in the 2004 elections receiving even slightly higher percentage (42.5%) than in 1999.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Carinthia", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki