VIENNA, -- Casting aside decades of diplomatic restraint, Austrian President Thomas Klestil showed unexpected fire as the country's political crisis moved to a climax this week.
After keeping a low profile during four months of tortuous negotiations that followed October's inconclusive election, Klestil snapped on Wednesday, condemning in unprecedented terms the politicians he was about to entrust with power.The 67-year-old former diplomat said he did not want to authorise Wolfgang Schuessel's People's Party and Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party to form a government because it would lead to Austria being ostracised.
But he had no choice as they had a commanding majority in parliament.
The Freedom Party's leaders, Klestil told NEWS magazine, "continue to use a language which disqualifies them for every political office."
Schuessel, the conservative leader whom Klestil will swear in as chancellor on Friday, had pursued "a zigzag course never seen before in the Second Republic, which gives gooseflesh to an upright politician like myself...What I miss is reliability and predictability."
Although he bowed to the inevitable and agreed to approve the new government, Klestil kept fighting to the last.
His statement on Thursday announcing that Schuessel would be sworn in on Friday was remarkably terse and lacking in the usual courtly finesse.
And the head of state said he had rejected two of Haider's nominees as ministers--one for threatening to give Klestil a "bloody head," the other for having mounted a racist election campaign in Vienna.
It was a remarkable transformation for a man who has generally shunned the limelight and who has never looked entirely comfortable on public occasions, preferring to work discreetly behind the scenes.
Born in 1932, the youngest of five children of a Vienna streetcar driver, Klestil spent 18 of his 35 years as a professional diplomat in the United States.
He went straight from university into the diplomatic service, first with Austria's mission to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, then to the embassy in Washington as a junior diplomat.
He later served as Austrian ambassador to the United Nations and the United States.
After resigning from the diplomatic service, he was elected president in 1992 as candidate for the People's Party.
The aloof Klestil won the respect, if not the affection, of Austrians for undoing the damage to the country's international image caused by revelations about the role of his predecessor, Kurt Waldheim, in the army of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
He was given much of the credit for normalising Austria's relations with the rest of the world after Waldheim was ostracised by Western leaders and refused admission to the United States.
In 1994, Klestil's wife, Edith, walked out on her husband after a long marriage over his relationship with a much younger aide, Margot Loeffler.
Klestil married Loeffler in 1998, shortly after being re-elected to a second six-year term.
In 1996, Klestil was hospitalised twice within three months with breathing difficulties, on one occasion handing his responsibilities over to then Chancellor Franz Vranitzky. But he appears to have had good health for the last four years.
Having experienced Austria's isolation under Waldheim "on the front line" as a diplomat in Washington, Klestil made clear he did not relish the prospect of what may lie ahead under the new government.
"It is highly regrettable that at the beginning of 2000 we again have to defend Austria abroad. It is a pity that we will have to use our strength and our time, not for practical work, but to a large extent for crisis management."