With state broadcaster ORF planning live coverage, President Heinz Fischer, who will give the main speech, and other politicians have asked for assurances that they will not appear in the same frames as anyone from the far right. "They realise it could get very embarrassing," says Hans Rauscher, veteran writer for Der Standard newspaper.
The fear gripping the elite shows the extent to which Haider managed to impose himself on Austria's political scene, becoming a figurehead for an array of far-right European groups. Particularly at such a sensitive economic moment, when parallels with 1929 and the great depression are drawn every day, the fear is that the extreme right may seek to exploit the symbolic power of such a gathering.
"The possibilities for a rise of the far right in the light of the financial and economic crisis are there," warns Anton Pelinka, professor of politics at the Central European University in Budapest and author of The Haider Phenomenon.
In fact the extreme right is already in the ascendant in several European countries. In Italy the Northern League is enjoying its place in Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition. Blocher's Swiss People's party is the biggest political force in the country, Belgium's Vlaams Belang maintains its strength in Flanders, while in Denmark Pia Kjærsgaard's anti-immigrant Danish People's party is the third largest in the parliament. Racism has risen in Europe in recent years, with polls showing widespread antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
But the far right does not seem to be finding it any easier to work together. "In the European parliament there's a strong incentive to do this - if you establish a party group you get funds and more opportunities," Pelinka says. "But the far-right parties have contradicting nationalistic narratives and this makes it very difficult to form one group."
"Denmark and the Netherlands suffered under the Nazis so their far-right groups would never consider joining forces with far-right groups from Austria and Germany," says Richard Brem, editor in chief of a Vienna-based online youth culture magazine. The same goes for the far-right movements of Poland and the Czech Republic. Like Bossi and Blocher, the Netherlands' late Pim Fortuyn might well have seen the well-dressed, perma-tanned Haider as a visual model for his own brand of populist politics, but in fact they had little in common beyond their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Fortuyn, who was openly gay, saw himself as a libertarian whose rights were being curtailed by the immigrant Muslim population. Haider's ethos grew out of an old-time fascism, his country's Nazi past and a psychological need to defend the Nazi generation - including his parents - who he thought were unjustly treated after the war.
"Official Austrian state doctrine after the war was that the Allies liberated Austria from Nazi Germany in 1945 and that Austria had been a victim of the Nazis in 1938," says Pelinka. "This overlooks the fact that the percentage of Austrians who participated in the Nazi regime was the same as in Germany. In contrast, Germany was forced to confront its past directly and did so. Austria was not and didn't."
In Germany, Haider - famous for his outbursts lauding SS veterans, his description of Austria as an "ideological miscarriage", his labelling of Nazi death camps as "punishment camps" and admiration for the Third Reich's "sensible employment policies" - could never have achieved the same success.
Haider himself was frustrated in his attempts to form a pan-European far-right club, though he was successful at least in his intention of provoking European leaders after they slapped sanctions on Austria following the electoral success of his Freedom party (FPO) in 2000.
Nonetheless he is credited with having injected new life into far-right politics. "He was one of the first in Europe to grasp that it's not about issues or a rational discourse, but about emotion," says Brem. "He understood that politics was about marketing and you need to be marketing savvy to succeed."
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