AUSTRIA’S far-right leader Jörg Haider was killed in a car accident yesterday, just two weeks after staging a political comeback.

Haider, 58, is said to have been alone at the wheel of his VW Phaeton near the southern city of Klagenfurt when he veered off the road as he exceeded the speed limit while trying to overtake another car. He suffered head and chest injuries after the car rolled several times, and was pronounced dead in hospital.

“For us it’s like the end of the world,” said Stefan Petzner, Haider’s spokesman, who broke down in tears at a press conference. “He was not only my boss but also my best friend.” The Austrian president, Heinz Fischer, called the death a “human tragedy”.

Famous for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, Haider at the age of 29 was the youngest MP in the country’s history. He became leader of the Freedom party in 1986, pulling it out of obscurity and into mainstream politics.

In 2000 he led the right into a coalition government, prompting months of international isolation for Austria. Many of his statements were seen as pro-Nazi. He famously praised the employment policies of Hitler’s Third Reich and insisted SS members were “decent people”.

Although he retreated from national politics in 2005 after being ousted as party leader by his protégé Heinz-Christian Strache, he helped to channel public disenchantment with mainstream parties and anger about immigration and inflation into a dramatic resurgence of the right, which secured 30% of the vote in a parliamentary election last month.

Petzner said Haider had been driving from an official event to his home near Klagenfurt in the mountainous state of Carinthia, where he was governor, for his mother’s 90th birthday party.

Perpetually tanned and gregarious, Haider was hugely popular in his home state. Never out of the limelight for long, he visited leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi. In one parliamentary debate, he caused anger by calling Nazi concentration camps “penal camps”.

Such statements were given greater impact by the fact that his father had been one of Hitler’s stormtroopers and his mother a former leader of the Hitler Youth.

The European Union imposed sanctions against Austria after the Freedom party won 27% of the vote and took a share in a coalition with the conservative People’s party in 2000. The alliance soon unravelled, precipitating an election in 2002 in which Haider lost ground.

In 2005, he formed a breakaway party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, after a series of internal power struggles. Adopting a much more conciliatory tone, and even supporting Turkey’s bid to join the EU, his party won 11% of the vote last month behind the Freedom party under Strache with 17.5% .

Yesterday, Strache, who publicly feuded with his former mentor, said: “With his passing, Austria has lost a great political figure.”

Signs of reconciliation between the two appeared last week when they met to discuss a joint strategy to strengthen the right’s claim to a role in government after their success at the polls.

Haider, a passionate skier and marathon runner, was married with two grown-up daughters.

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