Die Wahlkämpfer

Wahlkämpfer follows party bigwigs and supporters of the FPÖ during the party’s first successful election campaign in Austria in 1992/93. Director Helmut Grasser talks with old and angry inhabitants of Vienna, with disappointed socialists, with Carinthian nationalists and with many others about present-day Austria, which they feel is teetering on the brink of disaster. Some of them compare the current dissolution with the order of the past, when, during World War II, women could still walk around safely. Others wonder why, aside from the excessive post-war concentration on the holocaust, no attention is paid to the millions of Prussian refugees who at one time came to a sad end. The interviewer is reserved yet tenacious, thereby almost imperceptibly undermining specious arguments. In the process, the bigwigs in Haider’s FPÖ, such as Haider himself, are revealed as not much shrewder than the xenophobic adherents of the Freie Partei Österreich. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)