Jörg Haider (German: [ˈjœʁk ˈhaɪdɐ] ; 26 January 1950 – 11 October 2008) was an Austrian politician. He was Governor of Carinthia on two occasions, the long-time leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and later Chairman of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, BZÖ), a breakaway party from the FPÖ.
Haider was a controversial figure within Austria and abroad. Several countries imposed mild diplomatic sanctions against his party's participation in government alongside Wolfgang Schüssel's Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), starting from 2000.
Haider died in a car accident shortly after leading the BZÖ in the 2008 Austrian parliamentary elections.
Haider's parents had been early members of the Austrian Nazi Party (DNSAP, the Austrian affiliate of the NSDAP, the German Nazi Party). Haider's father, Robert Haider, was a shoemaker. His mother, Dorothea Rupp, was the daughter of a well-to-do physician and head of the gynaecology ward at the general hospital of Linz.
Robert Haider joined the DNSAP in 1929 as a fifteen-year-old boy, four years before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. He remained a member even after the Nazi Party was banned in Austria and after Engelbert Dollfuss had dissolved the Austrian parliament and established the Ständestaat as a dictatorship.
In 1933, Robert Haider moved to Bavaria but returned to Austria the following year after the failed Nazi attempt to overthrow the Austrian government with the July Putsch. He was arrested and chose to move back to Germany where he joined the Austrian Legion, a division of the Sturmabteilung. Haider senior completed a two-year military service in Germany and returned to Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss). From 1940 on, he fought as a junior officer on the Western and Eastern Fronts in Europe during the Second World War. Having been wounded several times, he was discharged from the Wehrmacht with the rank of lieutenant. In 1945, he married Dorothea Rupp, at that time a leader in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM).
Following the end of the war, Haider's parents were investigated as part of the denazification process, conducted to determine what measures should be taken against them because of their NSDAP membership (proceedings against all former Nazis—NSDAP members and collaborators—were undertaken as a matter of law in both Austria and Germany after the war ended).
They were labelled as "Minderbelastet" (meaning "compromised to a lesser degree", i.e. low-ranking in the NSDAP structure). Robert Haider found a job in a shoe factory. Dorothea Haider, who had been a teacher, was prohibited from teaching for a few years following the end of the war. Robert was forced to dig graves. Haider's mother eventually outlived him, turning ninety on the day he died.
Haider was born in the Upper Austrian town of Bad Goisern in 1950, a time when his parents' finances were rather moderate, and his elder sister, Ursula, was four years old. He performed well at primary school and attended high school in Bad Ischl despite his parents' financial situation. Haider was reportedly always at the top of his class at high school. During his time in Bad Ischl, he had first contacts with nationalist organisations, such as the Burschenschaft Albia, a right-wing student group.
After he graduated with highest distinction in 1968, he was drafted into the Austrian Army, where he voluntarily spent more than the compulsory nine months (called "the voluntary one year"). After his discharge in 1969, he moved to Vienna and began studying Law and Political Science at the University of Vienna. He graduated in 1973 with the title of Dr iur. During his studies, he was affiliated again with a Burschenschaft: Silvania. In 1974, he started to work at the University of Vienna law faculty in the department of constitutional law.
Haider was married to Claudia Hoffmann from 1 May 1976 until his death. They had two daughters.
Throughout his career Haider had concentrated his politics on Carinthia. His personal life was heavily connected with this part of Austria: Haider became wealthy in 1983 when he inherited the estate of Wilhelm Webhofer, who had owned a large parcel of land in Carinthia commonly known as "Bärental" (bear valley). 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 in time the Nazis still hesitated to take possession of property owned by non-German Jews without any compensation. Inside Italy, Jewish property was not yet open for confiscation and the Mussolini government was not inclined to allow this to happen to Jewish nationals abroad either. Thus when the estate was sold in 1941, one Josef Webhofer (a former resident of South Tyrol, Italy, and an Optant) paid 300,000 Reichsmark (equivalent to 1 million euros in 2021) to obtain title to the land. After the war, Mathilde Roifer, the widow of the former Jewish owner of Bärental, demanded compensation.
Despite a panel finding that the property was fairly sold, Webhofer paid Roifer an additional sum of approximately 661,000 schillings (equivalent to 5 million euros in 2018). In 1955 Josef Webhofer's son, Wilhelm, not a blood relative of Haider but rather a "Wahlonkel" or uncle-by-choice, inherited the estate and later bequeathed it to Haider.
The Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) was founded in 1955, and initially was a mixture of various political currents opposed both to the political catholicism of the Austrian People's Party and the socialist views of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ).
With its roots in the Pan-German movement, it included both German-nationalist and liberal political views. In 1970 Haider became the leader of the FPÖ youth movement and headed it until 1975. Haider rose rapidly through the party ranks. In 1972, at the age of 22, he was already a well-established leader and was made party affairs manager of the Carinthian FPÖ in 1976. In 1979 he was the youngest delegate among the 183 members of parliament, at age 29.
Beginning in 1983 his policies became more aggressive, when he rose to party head of the Carinthian FPÖ and started to criticise the leaders of the FPÖ, which at that time was still a minor political movement in Austria, usually winning only about 5–6% of the vote.
The decisive point of his career came in 1986 when he defeated Austrian Vice Chancellor Norbert Steger in the vote for party leadership at the party convention in September in Innsbruck; many delegates feared that Steger's liberal political views and his coalition with the Social Democrats threatened the party's existence. Haider represented the pan-German nationalist wing of the party, opposed to the classical liberal one led by Steger.