Daily demonstrations interfere with the acceptance and normalization that the new government deems its right by popular mandate. Haider appears to be waiting for the uproar to settle down and for acceptance of the FPO before he claims a senior role in the federal government. Haider threatened to initiate a treason investigation against Austria's president, Thomas Klestil, on charges that Klestil collaborated in an international conspiracy with the Austrian opposition and the European Union to prevent the new government's formation. The wild temper over political opposition, so characteristic of fascist demogogues, has emerged early. This new Austrian government, entirely the product of liberal democratic groundrules, challenges the political borders of the European Union.
Political memories are at work here.
The incremental advances by the Nazis during the four 1932-33 German elections, beginning from a 30 percent vote share very close to the 27 percent attained by Haider's FPO, illustrated the fragile limits of liberal parliamentarism. Hannah Arendt observed that two opposed ideologies drove twentieth-century politics, the ideology of class and labor and the ideology of 'race'. In the issue of immigration, Haider has seized on a paradigm that unites the two. Immigrants, the labor force searching for better lives, have been demonized as a threat to the racial constitution of nations. Haider, like Le Pen in France, relies on an appeal to non-existent purisms as protection against contamination of a putative national soul.