Austria's far right claims Goldsmith as ally

Flushed with its success in Sunday's elections to the European parliament, Austria's far right Freedom Party yesterday said that it had formed links with members of Sir James Goldsmith's anti-European movement, and right-wing Conservatives.

Jorg Haider, the Freedom Party's leader, said that his party was seeking to join forces with all those who shared its aim to revise the Maastricht treaty on closer integration and to oppose the speedy introduction of a single European currency.

Mr Haider refused to name names, but others in the party indicated that likely allies could include Sir James Goldsmith's "Europe of the Nations" group, members of the Italian Northern League led by Umberto Bossi, and even Euro-sceptic British Conservative MEPs, currently part of the centre- right European People's Party bloc. Sir James's group is perilously close to the minimum 18 MEPs required to form a group in the European parliament.

"We have developed some pretty good contacts with the Goldsmith and Bossi groupings and some British Conservatives," said Wolfgang Jung, a Freedom Party MEP. "What we would like would be to have informal arrangements with them, a form of technical co-operation."

A spokesman for the Conservative MEPs described as "absolute rubbish" the suggestion that any of them would want to work with Mr Haider. "No approaches have been made to British Conservatives in Strasbourg, nor would they accept any such approaches," he said. "There has clearly been a misinterpretation."

The Freedom Party's five MEPs (to be increased to six as a result of Sunday's vote) stand outside all Strasbourg's established political groupings and are lumped together with an assortment of unaffiliated independents, including the Reverend Ian Paisley and members of the French National Front, headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen. As a man who has publicly praised Hitler's employment policies and the "decency" of members of the Waffen SS, Mr Haider is generally considered to be beyond the political pale. Three years ago the formerly liberal Freedom Party was expelled from the Liberal International. It has since been shunned by all the mainstream parties in both Austria and Strasbourg.

With his blatantly xenophobic and populist policies, Mr Haider has often been likened to Mr Le Pen, whose party was alone in Europe in welcoming the Freedom Party's success in the Austrian vote.

After years out in the cold, however, Mr Haider is now making a concerted effort to gain political acceptability: a tactic illustrated by his selection of a Jewish journalist and author, Peter Sichrovsky, as his party's number two candidate in the European poll.

"All the people who want to push the Freedom Party into a far-right corner have to recognise it as a conservative party like any other in Europe," said Mr Sichrovsky, a man who once described Mr Haider as "scum" but who then converted to his cause. "I can tell you that several conservative parties [in Strasbourg] were just waiting for this result to start discussions."

The Freedom Party's 27.6 per cent in Sunday's vote brought it to within less than two percentage points of Austria's two leading parties, the Social Democrats and conservative People's Party, which scored 29.1 per cent and 29.6 per cent respectively. Leaders of the two main parties sought to dismiss it as a protest vote triggered by anger over a cost-cutting budget passed earlier this year, and disillusionment with the European Union almost two years after joining it.

In addition to revising the Maastricht treaty and slowing moves towards economic and monetary union, Mr Haider's priorities in Europe include negotiating a reduction in Austria's net contribution, a revision of the Common Agricultural Policy and the creation of what he terms "a Europe of the 'fatherlands' ".

Essay, page 18

Socialists still in the driving seat

The European Parliament's Socialist group is set to lose two members following Austria's election on Sunday, while far-right parties will gain one new seat. The Socialists will remain the parliament's biggest group with 214 members, followed by the mainly Christian democrat PPE with 174 members. The unattached members - all but one members of far-right groups in Austria, Belgium, France and Italy - will grow to 32. The liberal ELDR has 52 members and the Greens 27 members.