Austrian elections: support for far-right collapses

Sebastian Kurz looks certain to reclaim his title of worlds youngest leader as his VP takes 37%

Support for Austrias Freedom party (FP) has plunged by more than a third as voters punished the far-right group in national elections for a corruption scandal that brought down the government.

The former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, 33, looks certain to reclaim his position as the youngest leader in the world after his Peoples party (VP) secured 37.1% of the vote its best result since 2002.

The Green party was the other big winner on Sunday, achieving its best result at national elections with 14%. The centre-left Social Democratic party (SP) plummeted to a historically low 21.7% but was still the second-biggest party.

The FP whose former leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned in May after a covertly filmed video showed the then vice-chancellor offering lucrative public contracts in exchange for campaign support to a woman he believed to be the niece of a Russian oligarch came third with 16.1%, a drop of about 10 percentage points.

Since June, Austria has been led by a caretaker government headed by the constitutional lawyer Brigitte Bierlein, after Kurz became the first chancellor in the countrys modern history to be removed from office by a no-confidence vote.

But the result on Sunday shows Kurz, who became foreign minister aged 27 and has reshaped the VP in his image since he took over the partys leadership in 2017, has emerged largely unscathed from what is known as the Ibiza scandal.

The Green party, which in 2017 failed to get over the 4% threshold for the first time since 1983, gained 10.2 percentage points to re-enter parliament, fuelling speculation Kurz could invite it to form a government, possibly in a three-way alliance with the pro-business, liberal NEOS party, which took 7.8%.

While Green supporters frantically celebrated the result, a coalition with the VP is only backed by a third of its members.

With Strache banished from office and the FP under new leadership, a renewed alliance between the conservatives and the far right was considered the most likely outcome until Sunday evening, when the party performed considerably worse than expected. On Austrian television, its general secretary, Harald Vilimsky, said FP had no mandate to enter another coalition with Kurz.

The party, which is led by the hardline former interior minister Herbert Kickl and the 2016 presidential candidate Norbert Hofer, has openly rallied for a reunion with the VP. Its campaign video shows Hofer readjusting a portrait of the 33-year-old former chancellor to stop it tilting to the left.

For Kurz, a renewed pact with a diminished far right would likely tilt the balance of power in his favour. Before the election on Sunday, he appeared to have already ruled out handing another post to Kickl.

Kurz also knows he can contain the aggressive style of rightwing populists more easily by keeping them close rather than pushing them on to the opposition benches.

Nonetheless, there is strong opposition across the country to an VP-FP alliance, as well as in Kurzs party. During the year-and-a-half in which the FP took part in Austrias government, it managed to rack up a large number of minor and major scandals.

Martin Kotynek, writing in the newspaper Der Standard, said: The coalition with the FP was a mistake. Kurz overestimated its capability for government. Now he has a chance to correct that mistake.

The FP was the only party not to be invited to hustings organised specifically for Austrias Jewish community. Bini Guttmann, the incoming president of the European Union of Jewish Students, described the party as structurally antisemitic.

Kurz on Sunday night signalled he was willing to enter coalition talks with both FP and the Greens: I have promised to hold talks with all parties, the Vienna-born politician said. And I sure wont break my promise on the night of the vote.

A grand coalition with the SP, which has been the norm for much of the period since the second world war, has come to be associated with political stasis and infighting, and would sit uneasily with Kurzs reformist agenda.

In his election manifesto, Kurz promised tax cuts for businesses and families and 5bn (4.5bn) in public spending reductions. I want to pursue decent centre-right politics, he told the state broadcaster RF.

In the run-up to the election, Kurz and Kickl used the same slogan in their poster campaign Someone who speaks our language next to a photo of the lead candidate.

The SP, which is led by a woman, Pamela Rendi-Wagner, for the first time in its history, has struggled to profit from the corruption scandal.

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