Austria’s populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) has bounced back form its presidential election defeat on Sunday, vowing to take control of the country after the next parliamentary elections.
After a polarising 11-month campaign, Green candidate Alexander Van der Bellen vowed on Monday to be president for all Austrians, including the nearly 47 per cent of voters who backed his EU-critical FPÖ opponent, Norbert Hofer.
But his vow to unite the country will be easier said than done, given how less-educated, rural and male voters uniformly backed Mr Hofer.
FPÖ strategists dismissed the idea that Sunday’s vote was about Austria rejecting the Brexit-Trump anti-establishment trend, confident instead that voters have merely postponed the day of reckoning.
“People want renewal and change, they don’t want that we go back to business as usual . . . and we are more successful than ever,” said FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache.
Still the largest party
Despite Mr Hofer’s defeat, the populist FPÖ remains Austria’s largest party with one-third support in polls. In contrast, the presidential campaign has exposed yawning divisions between Vienna’s ruling Social Democrats (SPÖ) and its conservative (ÖVP) junior coalition partner, as well as divisions within the coalition parties.
The ÖVP is in a particularly bad way, with feuding factions in open revolt after leading party figures backed competing presidential candidates.
On Monday, beleaguered party leader Reinhold Mitterlehner dismissed talk of early elections next year as a “vote of no confidence” in the government’s work. After almost a year of electioneering, he suggested that voters wanted the government to get back to work.
Pressed on ORF radio, however, the ÖVP leader refused to rule out a postelection coalition with the FPÖ – mirroring their 1999 coalition government.
“The next election is still open as far as coalitions are concerned. The voters will decide that,” he said.
A similar mood of disunity reigns in the SPÖ. For three decades the party’s official line has been to refuse all co-operations with the populist Freedom Party. On Monday, Vienna’s influential SPÖ mayor, Michael Häupl, insisted that nothing had changed on this front.
“I view as impossible SPÖ/FPÖ after the next parliamentary election,” he said.
But regional SPÖ co-operation with the FPÖ has watered down that taboo. Last month, new party leader and chancellor Christian Kern launched a very public courtship of the populists.
Emerged no stronger
Political analyst Peter Filzmaier suggests that Austria’s estranged ruling coalition dodged a bullet with the presidential election outcome, but has not emerged any stronger.
“After this election is before the next election,” he said. “The coalition parties’ basic problem remains the same: do they still want to work together? The answer tends towards no.”
As Mr Van der Bellen prepares his move into the Hofburg Palace, with a six-month delay caused by an election rerun, the economist dubbed “the professor” has his work cut out to prove himself.
He was born in Vienna to an aristocratic Russian father and an Estonian mother who fled Stalinism. In 1945 they later fled the Red Army’s arrival into the Austrian capital and landed in the southern state of Tyrol.
