Speed kills, then. The circumstances of Jörg Haider’s death seem to be clear, banal and self-inflicted, for all the conspiracy theories that boiled up after his car crash on Saturday.

The leader of Austria’s Far Right was driving alone in his black Volkswagen Phaeton on a little-travelled road in southern Austria and crashed into a concrete pillar while overtaking another vehicle. The speedometer of the wrecked sedan was stuck at 142kph (88mph), police said – more than twice the limit for that road.

The death will only boost his reputation for indifference to rules, convention and risk. Flowers, notes and tributes piled up at the crash scene but many will not mourn this determinedly offensive politician. Haider, in leading a revival of the Austrian Far Right, set out to say what is rightly unsayable in modern Europe. He praised the employment practices of the Nazi era, said that the SS should be honoured and called concentration camps “punishment camps”.

He distanced himself from those remarks later, sort of, but many doubted a real change of heart. The war years appeared to arouse his passion more than anything in current policy, but he also launched an assault on immigration. He took his critics’ loathing as proof of his courage, as he did the diplomatic sanctions slapped on Austria in 2000 by the European Union in protest at his party’s role in government. That was the first time the EU had done this to a member state.

The reason to take him seriously was not what he said but the number of Austrians he managed to persuade to vote for him. Haider, 58, governor of Carinthia province, had never held a post in national government. But he took the Freedom Party from 5 per cent in the polls in 1986 to 27 per cent in 1999, in the victory that shocked Europe. He split with his party after power struggles, and in 2005 formed the new, more moderate splinter party the Alliance for the Future of Austria. It won 11 per cent in September’s parliamentary elections, and the old Freedom Party 18 per cent.

In theory, Alliance and Freedom could unite now that Haider’s personal feuds are removed from the picture. Alliance was barely more than his own base. In practice, though, there are obstacles. Many Alliance supporters were drawn to him personally, and may now drift off. Rural voters in particular liked his folksy appeal, and he had tried recently to offer middle-class voters a more conciliatory tone – to be a politician whom they could support without having to defend themselves. After his exit the Freedom Party, under its new, young leader Heinz-Christian Strache, became more urban and working class. There may be no rush to explore unification until after Carinthia elections next year.

These internal squabbles aside, what will happen to the Right in Austria? The financial slump may take the sting out of inflation and immigration, Haider’s recent targets. The EU’s achievement of a rough coordination in shoring up banks may also weaken the anti-EU campaign, Haider’s other grand passion. But the turmoil will surely only strengthen the sense of fear on which he traded. He has gone but he revealed how efficiently that fear can be turned into votes.

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