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VIENNA: Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider died in a road accident on Saturday, the country's APA news agency reported quoting the police.
"The governor of Carinthia and leader of the BZOe (Alliance for Austria's Future) Joerg Haider died after a car accident early Saturday in Klagenfurt," the capital of his home state, the agency said.
Haider, 58, was at the wheel of his official car in the south of Klagenfurt when it veered off the road for unknown reasons after overtaking another vehicle.
He suffered serious head and chest injuries as his car flipped over several times and died shortly after the accident, APA added.
He had been expected to attend a family celebration Saturday marking his mother's 90th birthday.
"For us this is the end of the world," BZOe deputy leader Stefan Petzner told APA.
Haider, Austria's most notorious post-war politician, headed the Alliance for Austria's Future since late August after turning the country's far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) into a political force in the 1980s and 1990s and prompting EU sanctions against Austria in 2000.
Perpetually tanned, athletic and stylish, he had been transformed from a young firebrand to an experienced politician in the past decade, helping his young BZOe party, only founded in 2005, to its best result in general elections last month.
Media-savvy he never stayed out of the limelight for long, offering to mediate hostage crises in North Africa with his good friend Seif al-Islam, the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and forcibly removing bilingual street signs in Carinthia, which has a strong Slovenian minority.
Haider became involved with the youth wing of the FPOe in his early 20s.
After graduating with a law degree from Vienna University, he moved to southern Carinthia, where he soon became involved in local politics, quickly rising through the ranks of the FPOe until he took over the leadership of the party in 1986.
His run as Carinthia's governor was interrupted in 1991, however, after he made comments praising the Third Reich's employment policies. But he was re-elected in 1999 and 2004.
Haider in 2006 proposed a referendum to ask Austrians, who were largely unhappy with the euro and the European, Union whether they wished to stay in the EU.
"Austrians should get a new chance to decide whether they really want to be in the EU" or whether they should "become a sovereign and neutral state again," he said.
He said that the referendum should be held before the adoption of a European constitution as it would be impossible afterwards.
Austria joined the EU in 1995 after 66 percent of the population voted in favour of accession. But according to a 2006 poll, only 34 percent of Austrians still saw Europe as a good thing.
In this year's September 28 legislative election Haider managed to garner 10.7 percent of the votes for his party, making it the fourth political force trailing the Freedom Party now headed by Heinz-Christian Strache.
He would not rule out entering a national coalition government with the Social Democrats or the conservative OeVP which won 29.3 percent and 26 percent respectively but said he would not give up his post as governor.
- AFP/yt
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