Joerg Haider, the notorious right-wing politician, is set to reenter Austrian national politics after his Alliance for the Future of Austria designated him as party leader on Friday, weeks before general elections in September, according to dpa. Haider withdrew from national politics in 2000, when he stepped down as head of the Alliance to concentrate on his job of governor of Austria's southern province of Carinthia. According to current polls, the Alliance is predicted to win six per cent of the vote, trailing far behind Heinz-Christian Strache's right-wing Freedom Party, which is forecast to win 19 per cent. Haider's party is a spinoff of the Freedom Party he successfully led from 1986. It is still unclear whether 58-year-old Haider will also run as his party's top candidate for the September 28 elections, as he has indicated in the past weeks that he would like to stay governor. Haider is expected to be formally elected as party leader at a convention on August 30, Austrian news agency APA reported. Most recently, Haider gained attention by loading asylum seekers he suspected of being criminals onto buses and transporting them out of his province to other facilities in Austria. He also announced he would keep criminal asylum seekers in "special institutions". Haider became internationally known in 1991, when he said that the German Third Reich had had a "proper employment policy". Hitler's Nazi regime enslaved Jews, foreigners, regime critics, prisoners of war and others to work in German industries. The governor of Carinthia succeeds current party chief Peter Westenthaler, who was convicted at the end of July for giving false testimony after his bodyguard beat up a political rival. Westenthaler is appealing the verdict.
