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Conservative Sebastian Kurz on track to become Austria’s next leader Conservative Sebastian Kurz on track to become Austria’s next leader
(about 1 hour later)
The young conservative Sebastian Kurz is on track to become Austria’s next leader, projections of Sunday’s parliamentary election result showed, but his party is well short of a majority and could seek an alliance with the far right. The centre of political gravity in Austria shifted to the right on Sunday after the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) came out top in national elections, with incumbent chancellor Christian Kern’s centre-left Social Democrats relegated to second place ahead of the nationalist Freedom Party.
Kurz’s Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) is in the lead on 30.2%, with its current coalition partner, the Social Democrats, on 26.3%, neck and neck with the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ) on 26.8%, a projection by the pollster SORA said shortly after polls closed, based on an early count of 42% of non-postal ballots. Projections on Sunday evening put the centre-right ÖVP, led by 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz, coming out top with 31.7% of vote. The Social Democrats managed 27% while the far-right FPÖ failed to match its best-ever result, with 25.9%.
The projection had a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. It will be refreshed and become more precise as more ballots are counted throughout the evening. The result represents a triumph for Kurz, who has turned around his party’s fortunes and will likely be tasked with forming the next government, potentially in coalition with the FPÖ, a far-right party originally founded by a former Nazi functionary and SS member after the end of the second world war.
Another projection by pollster ARGE Wahlen also showed the ÖVP in the lead. Critics argue that Kurz, whose manifesto has called for lower taxes and tougher measures against “political Islam”, only achieved his victory by embracing a divisive agenda dictated by the far-right.
The shift in Austria’s political landscape comes only months after the FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer was beaten in the country’s presidential vote by a Green-backed candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen.
Kern called elections in May after months of deadlock over policy disputes between the governing SPÖ and ÖVP, who have jointly governed Austria in a “grand coalition” for the last decade.
While Sunday’s result would mathematically allow a continuation of the coalition, the election campaign has not just seen Kurz’s People’s Party drift to the right but sparked an increasingly ugly war of words between the former allies, intensified by allegations of “dirty campaigning”. Any rapprochement between the two parties would not just require deft diplomacy but could risk undermining Kurz’s platform for change.
SPÖ chancellor Kern, a former head of the country’s state-run railway operator who took over as chancellor in May 2016, has previously indicated that he would prefer to go into opposition if his party came second in polls.
Neither centre party has ruled out a coalition with the FPÖ, who formed a government with the SPÖ in 1983 and the ÖVP in 2000 – a move that was at the time met with outrage and economic sanctions from Israel and several EU member states.
Under leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who took charge of the party following a split in 2005, the Freedom Party switched from a broader anti-immigration message to more targeted anti-Islam rhetoric. In a recent TV debate, Strache called for Austria to join the Visegrád group of central European states whose borders overlap with the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian empire.
Speaking on Austrian TV on Sunday night, Strache described the result as a “great victory” and a sign of a “desire for change”, even though his party’s project result falls considerably short of the support the FPÖ has commanded in polls at the height of the refugee crisis.
A “dirndl coalition” between the ÖVP, the Greens and the liberal party Neos, mirroring a political constellation currently being debated in neighbouring Germany, on Sunday looked likely to fall short of a majority, with the Green Party on the verge of failing to meet the country’s 4% hurdle for entering parliament following a party split.
The Social Democrats, who have been governing as senior coalition partners for the last decade but led a campaign marked by blunders and scandals, will view the result with mixed feelings.
While the SPÖ’s overall share of the vote decreased, the party managed to improve its performance in the capital Vienna, where it gained 3 percentage points, and managed a better result than first exit polls had indicated.
The SPÖ’s pitch as a progressive alternative to the right-leaning policies proposed by Kurz’s conservatives and the right-wing populists was undermined by revelations that an adviser to the party had paid for a group of websites churning out xenophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to discredit its main challenger Kurz in the eyes of far-right supporters.
The Schmutzkübel (dirt bucket) scandal, which rocked Austrian politics two weeks ago, centred on at least two Facebook sites posting Photoshopped images and video clips that accused Kurz of secretly paving the way for a new wave of immigration from Islamic countries, and of being part of the “dubious political network” of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros.