Do you know if he is more right wing than those elected in Austria a bit back?
Dan M. Well, Haider was kind of a weird-Nazi sympathizer type with a rather surreal cult of personality, while LePen is more your standard-issue nationalist. Austria, remember, elected Kurt Waldheim _after_ it was revealed that he was a former Nazi. And if you want to know why the Israelis are right not to trust the UN, Secretary General Kurt Waldheim is a good place to start. OTOH, I was told during the whole Haider affair that what happened to the Austrians in that scandal was more a product of the fact that everyone in Europe save the Germans hated the Austrians, and the Germans were unable to protect them in this situation because of the Nazi link. So Haider may not have been as bad as he was often made out to be. Racism is far more mainstream in French and Austrian politics than it is in the US (or Britain or Germany, for that matter, to be fair) so I'm not even sure how I would compare the two on that scale. Gautam
