Austria set to vote out Haider, seek wide coalition

By Staff
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VIENNA, Sep 27 (Reuters) Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel is favourite to win Austria's general election on Sunday when voters may kick out his controversial ally of the past six years, right-wing maverick Joerg Haider.

The end of Schuessel's alliance with Haider, which prompted diplomatic sanctions in 2000 and brought Austria close to its first post-war general strike, against pension reform, is the only result pollsters dare to predict with near-certainty.

After a divisive six years and a campaign peppered with scandal and allegations of xenophobia, most Austrians would like a return to quieter days.

''This was the dirtiest campaign ever,'' says Anton Strieder, an insurance employee in the capital Vienna. ''I hated it. There was way too much emotional argument.'' Schuessel's conservative People's Party and the centre-left Social Democrats, the two major parties, have run Austria together for 34 years since World War Two. A rerun of this ''grand coalition'' is what most Austrians want now, polls show.

However, as a record six groups could hurdle the 4 per cent barrier to gain parliament seats and opinion polls are too close to make a confident call, many other variants are thinkable.

''The most important question is not if the People's Party gets one per cent more or less, but will there be four, five or six parties,'' said Anton Pelinka, a political scientist. ''The more likely is the grand coalition.'' If it yields a majority, both big parties may prefer to team with the environmentalist Greens, whose ageing leadership seems more keen on a deal than after the 2002 elections and may be ready to make it politically cheaper than a grand coalition.

A return to a Schuessel government by the hard-right Freedom Party which Haider led into the coalition in 2000 remains a theoretical possibility. But it would be an about-face for both Freedom and Schuessel, who have both ruled it out.

''After the election, the facts will rule: every majority which is possible arithmetically will be negotiated,'' said Peter Hajek of pollster OGM.

BANKING SCANDAL The vote is unusually hard to forecast because of two events in the past 15 months that shook Austria's political landscape and overshadowed policy issues like unemployment or pensions.

Haider's break from the Freedom Party last year added to voters' exasperation with the volatile populist. Hiring old protege Peter Westenthaler to run his campaign, with demands to expel 300,000 immigrants, could not revive poll ratings.

The Westenthaler-run Alliance for Austria's Future will be hard pressed to make the 4 percent parliamentary threshold.

On the other side of the spectrum, the Social Democrats lost the momentum they had in regional elections and opinion polls when their campaign accusing Schuessel of fostering social division was upstaged by a banking scandal this year.

In March, the trade union federation OeGB, a close ally of the Social Democrats, was thrown into political and financial crisis by the emergence of a series of scandals over hidden losses and false accounting at union-owned bank BAWAG.

Horrified and powerless, Social Democrat leader Alfred Gusenbauer had to watch his opinion poll lead melt away.

The People's Party rubbed in the message, plastering Austria with posters saying: ''Social Democrats can't run the economy.'' It has built up and preserved a two to three-point lead.

But apart from below-the-belt attacks over the BAWAG scandal, both the People's Party and the Social Democrats have avoided staging a divisive debate over painful reforms similar to recent election campaigns in Sweden or Germany.

''It's all getting a bit too much for Austrians, and they yearn for the old, relaxed, 'grand coalition','' said Hajek.

REUTERS AB HT1930

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