This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 16: Haider’s successor has confirmed that Haider was drunk - very drunk - when he crashed his car.

The Austrian papers are full of pictures of the suntanned politician Jörg Haider, who was a man for all seasons and who learned the lesson from American politicians to always smile and to shake hands with everybody. If one could believe some newspapers and some declarations of the Austrian political elite, a sort of Austrian Mother Teresa has passed away. The former Social Democrat Heinz Fischer, who is now President of Austria, described Haider’s death as a “human tragedy.”

Continue reading ‘Jörg Haider: A Leader Who Died As He Lived’