(CNN) -- Thousands of people turned out Saturday in the southern Austrian city of Klagenfurt for the funeral of politician Joerg Haider, a popular but polarizing figure who led right-wing Austrian politics for decades.



Harald Scheucher, mayor of Klagenfurt, speaks in front of the coffin of Joerg Haider Saturday.



Among those attending the service at the town's central Neuen Platz square were Austrian President Heinz Fischer and Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer. Haider's widow sat in the front row with her two daughters, all of them dressed in black.



"Many people expected things of Joerg Haider that they themselves weren't able to fulfill, and he too expected things of people that he wasn't able to fulfill," Gusenbauer said at the funeral. "Therefore his death, and the end of his life, may be a time to think about whether death's only consolation is that we can now reconcile things that seemed irreconcilable during his lifetime."



Haider's coffin was draped in the yellow, red and white flag of the southern state of Carinthia, where he was governor, and topped with red roses.



Haider, 58, died last Saturday in a car accident while driving out of Klagenfurt, the state capital. He had just passed another car on a highway when his car hit a concrete post and rolled over several times, police said.



His spokesman said this week that Haider was drunk at the time of the crash.



Besides being Carinthia's governor, Haider was also head of the right-wing BZO party (Alliance for the Future of Austria), which he founded in 2005 after years with the conservative Freedom Party.



Haider came to prominence in 1986, when he became head of the Freedom Party while still in his 30s.



A politician who projected youth and style, Haider appealed to many working-class Austrians, promising to cut their taxes and give money to those with children. Some older Austrians responded to his demands for strict law and order.



But he drew widespread criticism both at home and abroad for his anti-immigrant stance and remarks considered anti-Semitic, and in 1991 he publicly praised Nazi Germany's employment policy.



Asked in 2000 about the statement, Haider told CNN the quote was taken from a long speech and that he never praised the Third Reich. He called the remarks a mistake and publicly denounced Nazism.



But Haider continued to draw attention for his controversial remarks. They included an address to veterans of the Waffen S.S., Adolf Hitler's elite soldiers, in which he praised their character.



The address created an uproar after it was broadcast on German television. Haider said he had simply been speaking to elderly citizens of Carinthia who included some former Waffen S.S. members.



Despite the controversy, Haider said he was not racist: "You will not find any anti-Semitic position in our party program, and you will not find any anti-Semitic speech or statement by me."



The policies of the Freedom Party drew international attention during the elections in 1999. Party campaign posters urged voters to stop the flood of immigration and used the term "over-foreignization," the same word used by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1933 to criticize what he called Jewish influence in Germany.



Haider told CNN he favored restricting immigration simply because of Austria's small size, but that he wanted to keep an open border for refugees.



It was his family background, Haider said, that kept singling him out for criticism.



Haider's parents were activists in the Nazi Party long before Austrian-born Hitler annexed Austria to Germany in 1938. Haider's father, Robert, volunteered for the S.A., the notorious brown shirts who terrorized Jews and others before the war. He then served in the German army.



His biographer, Melanie Sully, said Haider felt a strong sense of loyalty to his parents and those in the war generation.



"He feels that what they sacrificed after the war in rebuilding Austria in very difficult circumstances needs to be honored and that they weren't all criminals," Sully told CNN in 2000.



Under Haider's leadership,
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