By Alexandra Zawadil
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider, a charismatic populist who helped thrust anti-immigrant politics into the European mainstream, was killed in a car accident on Saturday.
Haider, 58, who led the right into a coalition government from 2000 to 2006, polarised Austria and drew international condemnation with his anti-foreigner outbursts and for seeming to flirt with Nazi sympathies.
Last month, after years of retreat into provincial politics, he helped engineer a surge of Austria's far right to 30 percent of the vote in a parliamentary election, mining discontent over feuding mainstream governing parties, inflation and immigration.
His spokesman Stefan Petzner said Haider, who was governor of Carinthia province, had been driving to his rural home near Klagenfurt early on Saturday morning for a family gathering to mark his mother's 90th birthday when the accident occurred.
The car he was driving skidded out of control after he overtook another vehicle. He hit a concrete traffic barrier and rolled over several times, police said.
He was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.
"This is for us like the end of the world. He wasn't just my boss but also my best friend," Petzner said.
Haider was a gregarious character who struck a popular chord with ordinary people and had friendly relations with his political adversaries.
Austrians of every political stripe voiced shock at his death and said he had influenced public life, for better or worse, as no one else had over the past 20 years.
Along with France's Jean Marie Le Pen, Haider was instrumental in moving the far right, with its core grievances against rising immigration and a perceived loss of national identity through European integration, from the fringes towards the mainstream of politics on the continent.
He drew international headlines with outbursts that looked like apologia for Nazism and by making foreign trips to see leaders like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi.
Haider reproached Austria's government by citing the "proper labour policies" of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. On another occasion he referred to Nazi concentration camps in a parliamentary debate as "penal camps."
Drawing on fears of immigration and eroding national sovereignty in the European Union, Haider led the Freedom Party with a shock 27 percent of the vote into a governing coalition with the conservative People's Party in 2000.
His triumph stirred widespread condemnation and temporary European Union sanctions against Austria.
SPLIT IN FAR-RIGHT CAMP
The awkward alliance eventually unravelled, causing an early election in 2002 in which the Freedom Party lost heavily.
After power struggles within Freedom, Haider formed the Alliance for the Future of Austria in 2005. It became junior partner in the governing coalition while the Freedom Party defected into opposition.
In an election in 2006, the Alliance, whose reins Haider had given to a protege while he turned to Carinthian affairs, scraped past the 4 percent threshold to enter parliament.
Haider returned as party chief this year and, adopting a strikingly milder tone, led the Alliance to 11 percent of the vote in the September 28 election, behind Freedom's 17.5 percent.
The result could reconfigure Austrian politics with the Social Democrats, which re-emerged as the largest party, likely to struggle to form a stable coalition if it ignores the right.
Austrian President Heinz Fischer, a Social Democrat, said Haider was "a politician of great talent" who both enchanted and repelled his contemporaries.
Heinz Christian Strache, who took over the Freedom Party in 2005 and had feuded with his former mentor, said: "With his passing, Austria has lost a great political figure."
Haider's father was once a member of Hitler's Storm Troopers. His mother was a teacher who had been a Hitler Youth leader. A passionate skier and marathon runner, Haider was married with two grown daughters.
(Writing by Mark Heinrich; Editing by Janet Lawrence and Angus MacSwan)
