Waldheim Elected President of Austria

Kurt Waldheim, the center of a fierce international controversy over his alleged Nazi past, swept to a decisive victory in the Austrian Presidential run-off elections Sunday. With about 95 percent of the ballots counted, Waldheim, candidate of the conservative People’s Party, was given 55 percent of the vote to 45 percent for his Socialist opponent, Kurt Steyrer. Steyrer conceded about two hours after the polls closed.

The 67-year-old former Secretary General of the United Nations had been the odds-on favorite to win according to all public opinion polls in the weeks preceding the run-off despite mounting evidence indicating that he may have been implicated directly in atrocities against Yugoslavian partisans and civilians and the deportation of Greek Jews while serving as an Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II.

JEWISH COMMUNITY STATEMENT

The Austrian Jewish Community issued an official statement on Friday that it would accept the results of the election but would give “no congratulations” regardless of who was victorious. The statement said the campaign–which centered on Waldheim’s past rather than election issues–had been harmful to Austria as a whole and filled Austrian Jews with “anger and bitterness.”

“For the first time since the dark days of National Socialism, anti-Semitism has been used to achieve political goals without encountering resistance,” the statement said. It did not elaborate.

It remains to be seen whether the controversy raging around Waldheim will abate now or continue. Only last week, the World Jewish Congress, which led the campaign to unearth evidence against Waldheim, released a 95-page document reporting in detail its findings about Waldheim’s “hidden years.”

WALDHEIM FORCED TO ADMIT PAST

Those were his years as a lieutenant attached to general headquarters of Army Group E in the Balkans, commanded by Gen. Alexander Loehr who was later hanged as a war criminal. Waldheim managed to conceal his military service after 1941. He claimed in his autobiography that he spent most of the war as a student in Vienna after being invalided out of the service because of wounds suffered on the Eastern Front.

Moreover, Waldheim was forced to admit after the WJC campaign got under way that this was a falsification. The WJC transmitted its report to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese with an appeal that he implement the recommendation of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI) that Waldheim be barred from entering the United States.

Last Friday, the French government promised to make public the findings of an investigation it launched into allegations that senior French officials were aware of Waldheim’s alleged Nazi past as early as 1979. The investigation was begun in response to a request by the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.

NO NEW DATA FROM FRENCH FILES

But on Friday, the French released the contents of a file on Waldheim’s war record which shed little new light on the controversy and left unanswered what French officials knew.

The Israeli government conducted an investigation of its own. Last week Justice Minister Yitzhak Modai stated publicly that the evidence Israel was able to gather showed no direct link between Waldheim and war-time atrocities, though the intelligence he supplied his superiors could have made him an accomplice after the fact. The Justice Minister of Greece issued a similar statement.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry was furious with Modai for undercutting what had been a low key diplomatic effort by the Ministry to persuade European governments and intellectuals to use their influence to thwart Waldheim’s election.

INCENSED BY EXTERNAL INTERVENTION

The tenacious campaign by the WJC, joined by other Jewish and non-Jewish groups and individuals may well have been counter-productive if the intent was to deny Waldheim the Presidency of Austria. Austrian politicians and the populace were incensed against what they perceived to be attempts by outsiders to influence their internal affairs.

When Austrians went to the polls on May 4 to elect a President, they gave Waldheim 49.6 percent of the vote, only four tenths of a percent short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off. Steyrer won 43.66 percent, ecologist Freda Meissner-Blau 5.5 percent and extreme rightwinger Otto Scrinzi, 1.2 percent.

Waldheim may have picked up some of the votes cast for the minor candidates in Sunday’s run-off. He was clearly favored by a relatively low turn-out, especially in Vienna which is the Socialist Party stronghold.

There was rancor up to the eve of the elections. Last Thursday, Michael Graff, Secretary General of the People’s Party, sent a telegram to the WJC demanding clarification of an article published in the Austrian weekly, Wochenpresse. According to the article, a former Greek resistance fighter claimed that he was approached by a WJC official who offered him $150,000 to testify against Waldheim. The WJC promptly denounced the allegation as “a characteristic lie.”