Austrian Foreign Minister Maria Fekter has declared a victory in her lonely battle with the other 26 European Union countries to maintain her country's banking secrecy and avoid reporting foreigners' accounts to their tax authorities. Dismissing suggestions that her position had left Austria under pressure and isolated, the woman who has vowed to "fight like a lion" to defend the country's banking rules insisted she had emerged on top in weekend talks with EU partners.
"I can even report a success," she told the Oesterreich paper, because her counter-call to shed more light on opaque offshore trusts elsewhere was now part of an initiative by big EU countries to crack down on cross-border tax cheats.
It was a typically self-assured performance by Fekter, who described herself once as "the only man in the Austrian government". She has a reputation for speaking out when others hold their tongues. Her frankness about the euro zone crisis has upset some important men such as Italy's prime minister and the former head of the Eurogroup club of euro zone finance ministers.
She has developed a thick skin in rising from small-town politics to become Austria's most powerful woman. "I have been in Austrian national politics for 22 years, and you learn how to deal with criticism ... sometimes very invidious criticism," she told Reuters in an interview last year. "You are treated more brutally as a woman than men would be, but I can deal with this."
Fekter, 57, sits on the right of her conservative People's Party, junior partner in a testy coalition with Chancellor Werner Faymann's Social Democrats. There is no love lost between Fekter and Faymann, who has said he is ready to discuss sharing data on foreigners' accounts.
She wants to be remembered for whipping Austria's finances into shape, reforming taxes and helping stabilise the euro zone, in part via bailouts of laggards that have earned her the enmity of Austria's far-right opposition. Her straight talk has turned up the volume of Austria's voice in European politics. And with elections due by September she will be a major campaigner for the conservatives, one who is already sometimes touted in media as a possible leader of the People's Party.
She has a track record of speaking out of turn or undiplomatically, though she often complains that opponents misquote her or deliberately take her comments out of context.
Last June she told a TV interviewer that Italy might need a bailout because of its high borrowing costs, a comment that Prime Minister Mario Monti called "completely inappropriate". She suggested last year that Greece's problems could force it out of the European Union, and infuriated then-Eurogroup chief Jean Claude Juncker - who chaired meetings of euro zone finance ministers that she attends - by briefing media on a deal to raise the bloc's financial firewall before he announced it.
She later apologised, then complicated things by saying Juncker was upset because he was suffering from kidney stones, a comment Austrian media criticised as an invasion of his privacy. The incidents made Brussels officials joke about being "Fektered", while a Munich newspaper dubbed her the "witch of the south".
She became the star of the EU finance ministers' talks in Dublin on Friday and Saturday, single-handedly shaping the debate.
"The Austrian woman is well able to answer for herself. If you want to put a question to Maria, Maria will answer you," Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan told one news conference. Maria Theresia Mayr was born in Attnang-Puchheim, a small town in the largely rural province of Upper Austria, to a well-off family with a gravel and construction materials business. She acknowledges being a rambunctious child, the only girl in a pack of brothers and boy cousins.
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