VIENNA, November 23 (News Agencies) - Far-right strongman Joerg Haider tore into European Union enlargement at his last rally ahead of general elections on Sunday, clawing at votes for his struggling Freedom Party (FPOe).

"The reds [social democrats] and the blacks [the FPOe's conservative coalition partner] are selling Austria out," Haider told some 1,000 fans gathered in pouring rain late Friday.

"Once the European Union opens its borders to the east, our country will be invaded by cheap laborers, and the Austrians can go straight to the dole office," he said.

In a tirade against Slav influence, Haider added: "The Czech Republic will never belong to Europe unless it abolishes the Benes decrees", some of which justified the expulsion of ethnic Germans from the then Czechoslovakia after World War II.

In the working class district of Favoriten, where 30 percent voted FPOe in 1999, Haider strutted the stage in a leather overcoat under the tender gaze of Social Minister Herbert Haupt, FPOe leader by default after Transport Minister Mathias Reichhold gave up just 40 days into the role, blaming heart problems.

Haider has kept a low profile throughout the election campaign, shunning a public which widely blames him for the collapse of the conservative/far-right coalition government after just 30 months in power.

He spurred on a party internal row between radicals and moderates until Vice-Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer was forced to resign -- then refused to take on the party leadership himself.

Riess-Passer's resignation prompted conservative Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel to break his coalition with the far-right and call snap elections.

But Haider reappeared in the last stages of the campaign, when Haupt -- widely seen as no more than Haider's puppet -- took on the party leadership, in a bid to claw back votes the party lost as it plummeted in opinion polls after the government collapsed.

The far-rightist launched a virulent diatribe against privileges, disorder and the "Proporz" system, a form of Austrian nepotism which allowed previous grand coalitions between the biggest social democratic and conservative parties to fill important posts only with their members.

He vowed to defend the poor against the rich, the small against the big, and the "true" Austrians against the state, and Brussels and its bureaucrats.

"The old lion hasn't lost his claws," said Gerald Hallach, a painter from Favoriten, who attended the rally. "I've always supported the boss," he added of Haider.

The far-right strongman's hardline rallying calls seemed to back up rumors that he plans to turn his party once again into a radical opposition, having grown sick of seeing it in government.

By battling his own party in Vienna, making several visits to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and refusing to take on its leadership, Haider has let the FPOe's backing plummet to between 10 and 12 percent in the latest polls.

In the last general election in 1999, it came in second place, with 26.9 percent of the vote.

After leading his party to its greatest victory, Haider did not enter the coalition government which took power in February 2000 under pressure from the EU.

Some critics say he is deliberately drawing the FPOe into a humiliating defeat at the ballot box in order to remake the party in his own image in opposition after the polls.

Meanwhile, on Friday the outgoing coalition between Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservative People's Party (OeVP) and the far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) won 49 percent support in the latest Market institute poll.

Its leftwing rivals, the opposition social democrat SPOe and Green parties, won 48 percent backing ahead of Sunday's ballots.

The SPOe, with 39 percent of the vote, edged past the OeVP's 38 percent in the poll, while the Greens -- who won 15 percent in some recent polls -- dropped to nine percent, slipping behind the struggling FPOe's 11 percent.

With no party likely to win an absolute majority, both the conservatives and the social democrats need to win first place in order to have a chance of being invited first by President Thomas Klestil to form the next cabinet.

Chancellor Schuessel, who was widely rapped in February 2000 for bringing an anti-Semitic and xenophobic far-right party into government, is now seen as the man who brought the FPOe to its knees.

He pulled out of the coalition and called snap ballots when the FPOe was reeling from internal rows and a wave of resignations, then poached one of its most popular figures, Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, for his election team.

"If Schuessel managed to forge another coalition with the FPOe in order to become chancellor, he would be in a position to dictate conditions to his partner," said political analyst Peter Ulram.

Schuessel could also form a so-called "big coalition" with the SPOe -- a constellation which has dominated Austrian politics since the end of World War II, and was in power before the last elections in October 1999.