Far-right Austrian politicians forced to quit EU election campaign

Two leading far-right Austrian candidates for next month's EU parliamentary elections have quit, under fire from their own party ranks and bucking a trend of Eurosceptic parties in the ascendancy.

The co-lead candidate for the anti-immigrant Freedom Party said he had lost his party's trust after making racist comments, while the daughter of late Austrian right-wing populist leader Joerg Haider, Ulrike Haider-Quercia, gave up on re-energising her father's BZO party.

Far-right anti-establishment parties are expected to fare well across much of the EU in May's election, mining voter dissatisfaction with high unemployment and entrenched centrist parties seen as out of touch, and fear of immigration.

But the comments by the Freedom Party's Andreas Moelzer that the European Union's aggressive regulation made Nazi Germany look liberal by comparison and his warning the bloc could become a "conglomerate of negroes" risked alienating potential voters.

The Freedom Party is scoring around 27 per cent in Austrian national opinion polls, ahead of the governing Social Democrats and conservative People's Party.

But pressure had mounted on the party's leadership to fire the 61-year-old veteran EU parliamentarian, who was supposed to be one of its two top candidates.