Vienna  - Joerg Haider was one of Austria's most divisive political figures, but his memorial service on Saturday is set up like the funeral for a national hero.

Up to 30,000 people are set to attend the public mourning in Klagenfurt, the capital of Austria's southern province of Carinthia, where Haider was governor.

Before his death last Saturday, when Haider drove drunk at 142 kilometres per hour and crashed his car, the politician was known mainly for his anti-immigrant policies, his portrayal of refugees as criminals, or calling SS veterans "respectable people."

But Austrian media have shifted their focus from Haider's political legacy to covering the quasi-religious reverence with which the population of Carinthia mourns their "father of the province," as many call him.

As Haider's body was laid out in the provincial parliament on Thursday, Austrian television showed thousands lining up to pay their last respects, including one young woman with a child on her arm bending her knee in front of the coffin.

In the past days, politicians remembered him as a divisive figure but refrained from analysing his far-right policies. Both president Hainz Fischer and Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer are guests at the memorial service.

All of the Haider's political deeds "seem to have fallen victim to a general amnesia and amnesty," said Klaus Ottomeyer, a social psychologist at Klagenfurt University, who has done research on Haider.

Haider's Alliance for the Future of Austria scored a success in the September elections, winning 11 per cent of the vote. But his real stronghold was Carinthia, where 39 per cent of voters cast their ballots for the party led by the perennially bronzed populist.

"People saw him as a hero with a messianic touch, and that includes immortality," Ottomeyer said, explaining why Carinthians were showing such deep emotions.

Haider frequently descended onto waiting crowds from the heavens by helicopter, participated in extreme sports and used Biblical language such as "bearing the cross" to describe his job.

Haider also portrayed himself as a protector, be it from allegedly criminal asylum-seekers whom he sent off to other provinces, or from the federal government in Vienna, which demanded that that Carinthia do more for its Slovenian minority.

People's reverence for Haider has gone so far that some, including adherents of extremist right-wing ideologies, refuse to believe that Haider died at the age of 58 simply by driving too fast.

On the Internet forum Thiazi, which calls itself the "Germanic world net community," a German woman wrote: "I think he was disposed of."

But Haider's family and regional authorities are taking great care to preserve a spotless image after his death.

Carinthia's protocol office told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that - contrary to some media reports - European rightist politicians like the Italian Alessandra Mussolini, Jean-Marie Le Pen from France or officials from the Belgian Vlaams Belang would not attend the memorial ceremony.(dpa)