• Strache seen as further to right than mentor Haider
• Weakened main party faces coalition dilemma

He has been filmed in forests, carrying arms and wearing paramilitary fatigues in the company of banned German neo-Nazis. Islam, he says, is “the fascism of the 21st century”. He was photographed apparently giving a three-fingered neo-Nazi salute - though he says he was ordering three beers.

He mocks gay people; wants a ministry for the deportation of immigrants; says “Vienna must not become Istanbul”; hopes to repeal laws banning Nazi revivalism, and is pushing for a constitutional ban on the building of minarets. Heinz-Christian Strache, a former dental technician, is the new star of Austrian politics and the new poster boy of Europe’s extreme right.

“I was never a neo-Nazi, and never will be,” Strache has insisted. But when he sued the Vienna news weekly Profil for defamation, the court ruled that Strache could fairly be said to display “an affinity to national-socialist thinking”.

Strache, 39, led his Freedom party to 18% of the vote in an early general election on Sunday. His former boss and mentor-turned-rival, Jörg Haider, single-handedly steered his breakaway far-right Movement for Austria’s Future to 11% - meaning that almost one in three Austrians who voted opted for the extreme right.

“A unique case among the western democracies,” said Profil yesterday as Viennese liberals reeled from the results of an election that put the far right comfortably ahead of the mainstream conservatives of the Austrian People’s party and neck-and-neck with the Social Democrats, who narrowly won the election.

It will be very difficult for any party to muster a parliamentary majority. The only options are for the Social Democrats to invite Strache into government, or to form another “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats. Such a coalition collapsed in June after 18 months in office, and another attempt could fire a bigger protest vote for Strache next time.

The Freedom party last stunned Europe in 1999, when Haider led it to second place with 27% of the vote, and a place in government. On Sunday, under Strache, the combined far right did even better, while the big parties did much worse.

Strache has been heavily involved in extreme-right politics since his youth, when he was engaged to the daughter of one of the founders of the Austrian branch of Germany’s neo-Nazi National Democratic party. He became a city councillor in Vienna in the early 1990s, imitating the populist techniques of Haider: snappy dressing, outrageous soundbites and populist tub-thumping; he was quick-witted and entertaining.

By 2005 the Austrian far right was at a low ebb. The leader quit, formed a breakaway party, and in effect retired to run the province of Carinthia - before staging a comeback on Sunday. But it was Strache who took over the Freedom party and led it to an improbable success, taking 15% of the vote in Vienna’s 2005 local elections . In the following year’s general election, he mustered 11%, and then 18% on Sunday.

He is widely seen as more aggressive and more rightwing than Haider, and likes to bash Brussels (an easy option in a country that registers just 28% support for the EU), inveigh against Islam, and take a loud and proud anti-immigration stand.

Strache calls himself a true patriot, declaring his ambition to be chancellor or interior minister. He hopes to fashion a coalition with Flemish separatists, France’s National Front, Bulgarian extreme nationalists and anyone else who will join in a “European Patriotic party”.

“Thirty percent for people who portray national socialism as innocuous,” wrote the commentator Hans Rauscher yesterday, “Who crawl around in forests with neo-Nazi mates, who are surrounded by skinheads; who campaign against foreigners; make common cause with the European extreme right; toy with antisemitism; campaign against Muslims, and develop contacts with the Serbian Radical party whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, is in the dock at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Austria is tops in Europe again.”

Guardian

0 - Number of wins by Frankfurt, the last remaining winless team
5 - Total number of shots by Gladbach in their 0-1 defeat to Hamburg
7 - Goals scored by Patrick Helmes this season, that’s equal to or more than 8 teams (Hertha, Köln, Hannover, Karlsruhe, Bochum, Cottbus, Frankfurt, and Gladbach)
8.06 - The average number of points the average Bundesliga squad has after the first 6 games of the season. Compare with EPL at 8.35 and 20 draws after six games vs. 28 in the Bundesliga
9 - Number of different goalscorers in the Bremen-Hoffenheim game. That’s quite an accomplishment
10 - Saves by Rene Adler to preserve Leverkusen’s 3-2 victory over Bochum, the most in a single game so far this season
12 - Corner kick differential favoring Bochum in their 2-3 loss to Leverkusen
14 - Minutes Christian Lell played before being substituted by Massimo Oddo
16 - Times Christoph Daum has earned at least a point in his 18 meetings against Schalke
36 - Minutes it took for the Bremen-Hoffenheim game to reach 6 goals, making it the highest scoring game of the week by halftime
54 - Time of Possession, in percentage, of the losing teams this week
1798 - Distance, in kilometers, of Madonna from Frankfurt on Matchday 6 (she was in Athens at the time)

Poetry is one of my favorite genres of literature. I savor the works of Mary Oliver, David Whyte and Denise Levertov to name a few. In talking with a friend of mine recently, I had a difficult time finding the right words to define poetry so I went online and looked up the definition.

This definition of poetry comes from About.com by Mark Flanagan: Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary…. The very nature of poetry as an authentic and individual mode of expression makes it nearly impossible to define.

I thought about this definition of poetry with spirituality. For me, spirituality is about having all one’s energy moving in the same direction - flowing toward the One who created you, who fashioned you into being, who breathed love into the very soul of who you are. Spirituality is about taking seriously your relationship with God, being mindful of God in your own life, and waking up to a wider perspective of life.

With these definitions in mind, reading poetry can help us connect and deepen our spirituality by grabbing our attention and causing us to pause momentarily to ponder more deeply the mystery of life. Poetry can be a tool to deepen one’s spirituality by helping us connect our deepest emotional experiences of God with the language of rhythm, meter, and sound. Reading poetry can help us deepen our authenticity of spirit.

What expressions of poetry do you like to read? The classics? Contemporary? Freestyle poetry? Metered and rhyming poetry? Haiku? Poetry from different cultures? Who are some of your favorite poets?

May poetry help you stop and ponder the Mystery this day.