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7THE FIRST AMERICAN-STYLE AUSTRIAN POLITICIAN POPULISM VERSUS "SMOKE-FILLED ROOMS" "Of all the politicians I have met in Austria, Haider is the one most like an American politician." -U.s. Ambassador Swanee Hunt in her farewell interview with profil, May 26, 1997 PARTY ELDERS VERSUS BOYS' BRIGADE Many of the reasons that Haider is regarded as such a strange animal have their roots in Austrian peculiarities. One such reason rests on the fact that Austria is the odd man out, yet the FPO is very normal, seen in a European context. That paradox concerns membership and organization . As mentioned earlier, the rate of "card carrying" memberships in political parties in Austria had no parallel on either side of the Iron Curtain, with Italy being a runner-up. Until recently, Austria also had an admirably high rate of voter turnout. Both statistics were rooted in the same phenomenon: machine politics. People did not just register as supporters of parties the way Americans might do to vote in primaries but actually paid membership fees. It stands to reason they did so not because they were ideologically committed, since there are few reasons to regard the Austrian electorate as that much more politicized than, say, the population of Germany. As a rule, they did so because they expected some benefits in return, ranging from professional preference and civil service jobs to subsidized apartments, or even comparatively harmless perks, such as the honorific titles handed out by the corporate chambers. Only a minority of party members joined the party with the intention of actually engaging in politics or carving out a political career for themselves. This sort of machine politics made for reliable 143 144 THE FIR S TAM E RIC A N - STY LEA U S T R I A N POL I TIC I A N voters who might go through the motions of professing loyalty to key elements of party identification but who were generally centrist in orientation. Machine politics like this has a long tradition in Austria. As one Amer-·ican scholar used to say, only half jokingly, "I think I understand Lueger's Vienna, because I come from Mayor Daley's Chicago." (He was referring to Richard Sr., of course.) That was one way Vienna stayed "Chicago" far longer than did the original. Machine politics reached its heyday during the First Republic, when the parties gained control of the resources of . patronage hitherto reserved for the Imperial elite. The dictatorships that followed after 1933 had an ambivalent attitude toward mass membership : The Catholic Standestaat probably tried harder to make its citizens join the official Patriotic Front (Vaterlandische Front), but that was a sign of weakness and insecurity The Nazis restricted membership to a maximum of 10 percent of the population. It says something for Austrian traditions that this ceiling actually had to be raised in Austria to accommodate the local political culture.l During the Second Republic, machine politics continued or, rather, was actually reinforced by a more and more formalized system of Proporz (proportional representation) that included areas previously not subject to party influence, as with the nationalized industries. The FPO's predecessor party before 1933, the Grofideutsche Volkspartei , had certainly been no exception to the rule: About one-third of its voters were actually party members.2 After 1945 that was to change. The reasons that made it advisable to join either of the two big parties did not hold true fora habitual opposition party such as the FPO. If anything, it was the other way around. In some areas, members complained about automatically receiving a copy of the party's newspaper through the mail, because they did not want the postman to know.3 Membership rates were significantly higher in strongholds such as Carinthia. Rates were, and are, also usually higher in rural areas. In general, only about one voter in thirty was actually affiliated with the VdU in the early 1950s; for the FPO,4 that percentage slowly increased until it reached something like one in six during the 1980s (37,000 members and 236,000 voters in 1983) (see Figure One in the Appendix). That was little compared with SPO or OVP, in which every third voter is also a member. But compared with other European countries , even that sort of rate was actually quite high.S The FPO was a closet states' rights party European liberalism draws on a strong centralizing tradition. The FPO did not, as a rule, advocate [3.146...

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