Jörg Haider

Haider in 2007

Jörg Haider (26 January 1950 – 11 October 2008) was an Austrian politician. He was Governor of Carinthia on two occasions, the long-time leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and later Chairman of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich, BZÖ), a breakaway party from the FPÖ.

Quotes

• Haider: Someone who is capable of work, but is not willing to work — to take up a related or similar or approximately similar job — should be given the sanction of being forced to take on a job by having his unemployment benefit reduced.
  MP Günther Hausenblas: That amounts to forced work placement!
  Haider: Then I ask you: How do you justify this to the thousands and thousands of hardworking Austrian employees who fulfil their work obligations year after year? How do you defend that to somebody who for example has lost his job as a joiner, but then takes on a similar job in construction, just so that he doesn't have to go on unemployment benefit? And he is paying his hard earned money in ever higher deductions, so that a few can lounge around in the hammock of the social welfare state. That is not a system we can really defend.
  Hausenblas: We once had what you're calling for — in the Third Reich!
  Haider: No, they didn't have that in the Third Reich, because in the Third Reich they had a proper employment policy, which not even your government in Vienna can manage to bring about. That has to be said.
  • Debate in the Carinthian parliament (13 June 1991)

• The social order of Islam is opposed to our Western values. Human rights and democracy are as incompatible with the Muslim religious doctrine as is the equality of women. In Islam, the individual and his free will count for nothing; faith and religious struggle – jihad, the holy war – for everything.
  • stated in the early 1990s, as quoted in "Towards a Community of Values?" by Hans-Georg Betz – in Austria in the European Union (2003), p. 434