Far-right Freedom Party comes out top in Austrian elections

Austria’s Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreich) has secured the first parliamentary election victory for a far-right party in post-World War II Austria.

A projection for ORF public television, based on counting of over 90% of the vote, showed the Freedom Party finishing first with 29.2%.

That win has pushed Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei) into second place, with 26.5%.

The centre-left Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs) finished in third place with 21%.

The outgoing government, a coalition of Nehammer’s party and the environmentalist Greens, lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.

Speaking to his supporters in Vienna, Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl said it was a “piece of history that we have written together today.”

“We have opened the door to a new era. We are now really going to write this new chapter in Austrian history together,” he said.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am about this result. What we have achieved is beyond my wildest dreams.”

But to become Austria’s new leader, Kickl needs a coalition partner to command a parliamentary majority and that might be tricky.

He has said he is open to negotiate with other parties, but so far his rivals – including Nehammer and Social Democrats leader Andreas Babler – have said they won’t work with the far-right.

Speaking in Vienna, outgoing Chancellor Karl Nehammer said it was “bitter” that his party lost but his position towards Kickl hadn’t changed.

“I have always said, with Herbert Kickl, who believes in conspiracy theories, who accuses the WHO of being the next world government and the meeting in Davos of being a preparatory meeting for world domination, you can’t run a state sensibly and responsibly with him. And I still stand by that,” he said.

The far right has benefited from frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic and has also built on worries about migration.

In its election program, titled “Fortress Austria,” the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.

The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.

Kickl has also criticised what he calls “elites” in Brussels and called for some powers to be brought back from the European Union to Austria.

The Freedom Party’s win sparked protests outside the parliament building in Vienna with demonstrators holding placards with slogans including ‘Kickl is a Nazi’.

The final official results will be published later in the week after a small number of remaining postal ballots have been counted, but those are unlikely to substantially change the outcome.