Charging To The Right.(International Edition; EUROPE)

Byline: Rod Nordland

Austria's far-right parties may have modulated their tone, but their message is increasingly familiar.

Throughout Europe, the far-right parties have been largely banished, consigned to the dustbin of history. In France, the National Front is at its lowest ebb in years. In Germany, extreme-right-wing parties are marginalized and irrelevant in national politics. But in Austria, the far right is resurgent again. Last week two far-right parties--both stridently anti-EU, anti-United States and anti-immigrant--became the strongest such force in Europe, after national elections there gave them arguably the biggest share of the vote ever won by rightists in modern Western Europe.

Together they tallied 29 percent, only 30,000 votes behind the leading party, the center-left Social Democrats. SIEG ... was the pointed headline on the Austrian newsmagazine Profil, over a picture of the two right-wing leaders, newcomer Heinz-Christian Strache and Jorg Haidar, the longtime rightist politician. "Internationally, Austria is 'Naziland' yet again," said Die Presse in Vienna. And perhaps domestically as well, with the very real possibility that Austria's mainstream parties will be unable to form a government without turning to parties that directly or indirectly descended from the Austrian Nazi Party.

Both men reject any link to Nazis. But it is clear from their rhetoric and their electoral success that Austria is still struggling to overcome a legacy that the rest of Europe left behind long ago. In comparison to the Germans, the Austrians were late and reluctant to accept any responsibility for their role in World War II, seeing themselves as victims of Anschluss rather than willing participants. So while Germany banned Nazi and neo-Nazi parties in its post-War Constitution, and other nations' parties vowed never to go into coalition with the far right, ostracizing them socially and politically, the mainstream parties in Austria "never had the courage to force the right wing outside respectability," says Anton Pelinka, an Austrian political scientist at the Central European University in Budapest. In Pelinka's view, part of the reason for this, and for Austria's tolerance of extremism, is that unlike in Germany, Austria's intelligentsia failed to return after the war.

In the years to come, Austria would elect ...