A rerun of Austria’s presidential election has been postponed after the adhesive seals on postal votes were found to have come unstuck.



The rerun, which was ordered after complaints of anomalies in the counting of postal votes from the rightwing Freedom party (FPÖ), had been due to take place on 2 October. It will now be held on 4 December.

The Austrian interior minister, Wolfgang Sobotka, said: “We’re going to request that parliament approves a postponement of the election.”

The postponement is acutely embarrassing for Austria and the government of the chancellor, Christian Kern. Austria has been without a president since 8 July, when Heinz Fischer stood down.

The former Green party leader Alexander van der Bellen beat Norbert Hofer of the FPÖ by 31,000 votes in a run-off in April, one of the most closely followed Austrian elections for years.

On Monday, Van der Bellen suggested that the faulty glue was a metaphor for bigger problems in Austria, saying “what we need most of all is for us to stick together”.

He told a press conference in Vienna that the next president had a duty to ensure that he “did not add to the feelings of division, but would unite society at a time of ever growing political and economic uncertainty, which has been triggered by the Brexit decision”.

“Due to the high unemployment rate in Austria or the growing divide between rich and poor, we need cohesion in difficult times,” Van der Bellen said.

He called for the series of errors regarding the postal votes to be cleared up, saying: “It cannot be the case that in past years it was possible to vote with these voting cards, but this time it hasn’t worked. There’ll be a lot of people sniggering at us from abroad, but I could also make a few jokes about a number of other countries if necessary.”

Hofer did not try to suppress his anger over the postponement, saying it was a reflection of the general mess that Austria was in. “We now have a new date because the organisation has failed once again, because this republic is not capable of carrying out elections in an orderly way,” he said. “We simply want our Austria back.”

Hofer has called for the abolition of postal votes, which are known to favour Van der Bellen.

The FPÖ chairman, Heinz-Christian Strache, said he suspected an act of conspiracy against his party by political opponents, calling the decision to move the date “a tactical move because Norbert Hofer is currently ahead in the polls”.

The election might not have been postponed had the voter Beate Rhomberg not brought the problem of the faulty glue to the attention of her local paper. The paper’s ensuing report led to a barrage of complaints over voters’ envelopes coming unstuck and turned Rhomberg into a hero for some, but a figure of hate for others.

“Had I handed the envelope in immediately, I would not have noticed the mistake,” she told news agency APA, saying her envelope had gradually come unstuck over the course of a day. “I am completely annoyed by the whole thing,” Rhomberg said.

Among the remarks she has been sent on social media was one asking: “Why did she not simply stick it shut again with a Uhu? Then we wouldn’t have had all this fuss.”

Austrian police are investigating how the envelopes, which have apparently been made by the same company for decades, came unstuck. One theory is that they became too warm during transportation, drying the glue out.