Austria’s main far-right party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (bzö), won a landslide victory in regional elections in Carinthia on Sunday. The far right also gained ground compared to the more mainstream Social Democrats in Salzburg.

The Austrian Times reports: “With the death of firebrand governor Jörg Haider last October, critics had predicted the bzö’s iron grip on Carinthia to slip, but they came home with an astonishing 45.25 percent of the vote.” The Social Democrats won only 28.6 percent.

Haider, the bzö’s charismatic founder, died last autumn in a car crash.

The sympathy vote may well have played a role in the bzö’s victory, with people voting in memory of their former governor. But the election results also show how shockingly mainstream some of the far-right parties are becoming.

Haider admired SS soldiers as men of honor and once praised Hitler’s economic policies as being superior to those of the current Austrian government. To him, Nazi concentration camps were actually “punishment camps.” Spiegel Online reported that Haider’s “constant, often xenophobic, attacks on immigration and his vocal opposition to accelerating European Union integration earned him support from Austria’s largely EU-critical population.”

Haider’s successor, Stefan Petzner, has said that he will not deviate from his predecessor’s path “one millimeter.”

With Austria’s economic outlook grim, people are shunning the mainstream parties and voting right. Watch for this dangerous trend to continue across Europe as voters look for an alternative to the status quo.