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Liberal Green Party wins Austrian Presidency as Nationalist Freedom Party loses in a nail-biter

Alexander Van der Bellen, a 72-year-old economics professor and the former head of Austria’s Green Party, won a cliffhanger presidential election on Monday, narrowly defeating his far-right rival by the slimmest of margins – 50.3 percent of the vote to the ultranationalist Norbert Hofer’s 49.7 percent, a difference of about 30,000 votes, that was determined via absentee ballots.
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May 24, 2016

Alexander Van der Bellen, a 72-year-old economics professor and the former head of Austria’s Green Party, won a cliffhanger presidential election on Monday, narrowly defeating his far-right rival by the slimmest of margins – 50.3 percent of the vote to the ultranationalist Norbert Hofer’s 49.7 percent, a difference of about 30,000 votes, that was determined via absentee ballots.

Had Hofer won, on an anti-immigrant plank, he would have been the European Union’s first ultranationalist head of state in the 70 years since the Second World War.

The results were announced by Austria’s interior minister. The ultra-nationalist, anti-immigration Freedom Party and the Green Party were virtually tied in the runoff vote, laying bare the country’s political divisions four weeks after Hofer, the 45-year-old leader of the right wing party, led in first-round balloting. 

The outcome hangs on the some 740,000 mail-in ballots that were still feverishly being counted late Monday.

Pollsters project that Van der Bellen, 72, the Green Party candidate, needed 60% of the mail-in votes to win.

Since the end of World War II, Austria has been ruled by a series of “grand coalitions” cobbled together out of the two principal political parties, the Social Democrats on the center left and the Christian Democrats on the center right. Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann, a Social Democrat, resigned following his party’s elimination in the first round, on April 24th.

“It is a very stressful time right now, waiting, waiting, ” Florian Klenk, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Viennese weekly “Falter” told The Media Line, as he contested the popular point of view that elections for the Austrian presidency were akin to US midterm elections, or, in other words, not the main draw.

“The presidency here is a sleeping giant,” he said. “The former president didn’t use this power; he behaved like a state notary, but actually our constitution gives the president a lot of power, especially when it comes to appointing civil servants at the highest level in the ministries. But yes, it’s symbolic power. An important symbol: it’s a question of who our highest state representative will be: a right-winger who protests against refugees or a professor, a liberal, open hearted guy.”

Austria was split almost evenly in Sunday’s run-off for what has traditionally been perceived as a largely ceremonial role that actually has the power to dissolve parliament and guide national policy. Many Austrians say that the choice between diametrically opposed candidates calls for fundamental decisions being made about the country’s future political direction. 

The current predicament was, in part, created by a confluence of terrible political luck. Barbara Prammer, who was slated to be the Social Democratic candidate for the presidency, died of pancreatic cancer in 2014. Her party failed to reconstitute itself. The governor of Lower Austria, Erwin Pröll, who was expected to represent the Christian Democrats, bowed out of the election five months ago, leaving his party without a candidate.

Dr Hubert Sickinger, a political science professor at the University of Vienna who specializes in party organizations, told The Media Line that a principal reason for the standoff is “a very significant disconnect between the voters and the federal government.  The second reason,” he said, “was that none of the governing parties had a strong candidate.”

Sickinger outlined the ways in which the Austrian presidential elections for the titular head of state have little appeal to the average voter while offering the more committed voter the chance to protest through the ballot box. “We have to face the fact that in the eyes of the average Austrian voter, the election for the federal president is a second tier election,” he said. “It is not the important vote. The most important election in Austria is for the federal parliament. The presidency, the European Union parliament, also the provincial elections, these are second order elections.  They grant the voter the possibility to display his or her displeasure with the government without having a significant impact on the operation of government. It is important not to overestimate the importance of this vote, because we all know that neither the Freedom Party nor the Greens have any chance of getting 50% of the national parliament.

The refugee crisis, with Austria taking in some 90,000 Middle Eastern asylum seekers, which amounts to about 1% of the population, has had a major effect on the campaign, as have concerns about Europe’s economic fragility and the fear spawned by terror attacks on European soil.

Speaking with The Media Line, Euke Frank, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Austrian bi-weekly “Woman,” Austria's most popular women’s magazine, said that Austria’s current state of angst runs deep.

“For many years Austrians were convinced that life was constantly getting better: Five years from now I'll be better than today, 10 years from now even better. And our kids will definitely have a better life than their parents. This feeling of “being safe” has somewhat evaporated over the last years – because of the Euro crisis, the economic crisis, terrorist attacks in Europe and most recently the refugee crisis. The populist parties seem to have simple answers to these complex problems – and the basic answer is: We are the only ones who understand you, we know you are suffering, we know who the culprit is (the “system” and the “foreigners”) and we'll make the country safe again.”

She believes that Hofer’s strong showing is “primarily the result of widespread voter dissatisfaction with the established political parties in Austria which have ruled in grand coalitions for the greatest part of the last 70 years. And it is the result of a general sense of uncertainty in the electorate.”

Underlining the uncertainty, Florian Klenk said “we are at a crossroads that will determine the future of Austria. The Freedom Party, with all its problems and its focus on the past and on foreigners, versus the Green Party, pushing for an open Europe, a stronger Austria within the EU… We are, after all, talking about filling the post of the most powerful man in the Austrian coalition.” 

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