As Austrians vote for their next president on Sunday, many will be cheering on Norbert Hofer, the rightwing populist, in the belief that he represents a break with his party’s national socialist roots.

With a boyish smile and six years of experience as a rhetoric coach, Hofer has used the year-long election campaign to present himself as the respectable face of the Freedom party (FPÖ), which in the 1990s still praised the “proper labour policies” of Adolf Hitler.

But not everyone is convinced by Hofer’s transformation. Last week the leader of Austria’s Jewish community took the unprecedented step of endorsing a candidate. Hofer’s opponent, Alexander Van der Bellen, a former Green party leader running as an independent, was “not the lesser of two evils” but “the better candidate and a friend of the Jewish community and Israel for many decades”, said Oskar Deutsch, president of the Jewish Communities of Austria (IKG), which represents about 15,000 Jews.

In a Facebook post, Deutsch argued that Austria needed a president who stood up to “anti-Zionist, anti-American, anti-whatsoever” tendencies on the left and the right, “not one who directly or indirectly gives them a boost with polarising comments”.

It was not the first endorsement of historic proportions for Van der Bellen, who had won the original vote in May by a hair’s breadth only to see the result annulled because of irregularities in the counting process.

An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor also recently approached the liberal academic’s camp saying she wanted to make an appeal. In the resulting viral video, “Gertrude” said what worried her most about the Freedom party’s politics was that they brought out “the basest in people – not the decent, but the indecent” – adding “and it’s not the first time something like this has happened”.

Although the Austrian presidency has been seen mainly as a ceremonial post by its previous holders, Hofer has hinted that he would be a more overtly political head of state, saying he would have dismissed the government over its conduct at the height of last year’s refugee crisis, and promising to hold a referendum on EU membership if Brussels took further significant steps towards integration. Sunday’s election comes on the day that Italians vote in a referendum on constitutional reform, another in a series of crucial votes across Europe helping to redraw the political map of the continent.

The Freedom party, led by Hofer’s friend and ally Heinz-Christian Strache, has been consistently leading in the polls indicating the outcome of a general election, and as president Hofer would probably push for the “blues” to take the senior role in a coalition government.

To win in the re-run election, Hofer needs to turn around a 31,000-vote deficit from the May result. Although polls have shown the two candidates neck and neck, many believe that the change in the world’s political climate since the first vote could give the rightwing candidate a boost.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rally against presidential candidate Norbert Hofer in Vienna. Photograph: Lisi Niesner/EPA

According to a Gallup poll, the majority (53%) of Austria’s population believe Donald Trump’s US presidential success is likely to help Hofer.

Miriam Singer, a bookseller working in the shop at Vienna’s Jewish museum, said she would endorse Van der Bellen because she considered the Freedom party “unelectable”. But Singer conceded that the decision to annul the May result and subsequent triumphs for rightwing populists in Britain and the US could swing the contest in favour of Hofer, “who has managed to sell himself as the perfect son-in-law”.

“It’s going to be very tight, but I hope Van der Bellen can just edge it,” she said.

But a man hurrying down Leopoldsgasse in Vienna’s second district in traditional Hassidic clothing was more ambivalent. “Both candidates are equally bad,” said the man, who declined to give his name. “The Greens are pro-Palestine, which is bad for the Jews, and Hofer’s Freedom party we know all about.” Not voting was not an option for him, he said, so he was considering spoiling his vote in protest.

A rise in immigration from Russia and eastern Europe means that political attitudes in Vienna’s Jewish community are increasingly as complex as those in the rest of the country. The man on Leopoldsgasse said he was not scared of a Hofer presidency as such. “There is a god who protects me, and I just don’t believe Hofer will send me to a concentration camp.”

Like Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Freedom party has actively tried to distance itself from its antisemitic past since at least 2010, when it joined a cross-party alliance in the European parliament with Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom and Italy’s Northern League. Contacts with openly antisemitic parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik were broken off, a delegate expelled for antisemitic remarks on her website, and ties built up to Israel’s rightwing Likud party – the Israeli government, however, continues to reject all official contacts with the Freedom party.

Andreas Peham, an antisemitism expert at Vienna’s documentary archive for the Austrian resistance, said that the Social Democratic SPO and the Greens had helped create a space for the Freedom party’s realignment by failing for too long to condemn Islamist antisemitism. But Peham questioned whether the Freedom party had convincingly cut ties with its antisemitic past. “That would require a hard break with the rightwing extremist and völkisch elements in the Austrian fraternity movement, and that simply hasn’t happened.”

In 2012 party leader Strache’s Facebook page shared an image showing three men at a dinner table: “the government” was catering to an obese “banking system” while “the people” were left to starve. As the Profil newspaper showed, the posting had literally been copied straight out of the old antisemitic rulebook: only the banker’s hooked nose in the original image had been slightly altered.