Austria’s centre-right ex-chancellor Sebastian Kurz looks likely to return to power only four months after a video sting operation brought down his coalition government with the nationalist right.

Kurz’s Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) is expected to come out top when 6.4 million Austrians head to the polls this Sunday, but may have to consider forging unorthodox alliances after the “Ibiza scandal” reconfigured the Alpine country’s political landscape.

Since June, Austria has been led by a caretaker government headed by the constitutional lawyer Brigitte Bierlein, after Kurz became the first chancellor in the country’s modern history to be removed from office by a no-confidence vote.

The 33-year-old was ousted in the wake of the release of a covertly filmed video in which the then deputy chancellor and leader of the far-right Freedom party (FPÖ), Heinz-Christian Strache, suggested he could offer lucrative public contracts in exchange for campaign support.

Strache resigned from his position as chairman, and the Freedom party goes into this weekend’s elections fronted by the hardline former interior minister Herbert Kickl and Norbert Hofer, who narrowly lost out on the Austrian presidency in 2016.

With the Freedom party’s clean image bruised from the corruption scandal and the election campaign dominated by issues around the climate crisis rather than immigration, the nationalist party is likely to perform worse in Sunday’s vote than in 2017. Yet a rerun of the conservative-nationalist alliance with Kurz’s party is still on the cards.

The main argument against a fresh pact between the ÖVP and the FPÖ, wrote the liberal newspaper Der Standard, was less “moral qualms” on Kurz’s part than fear of reputation damage. It said: “In spite of the proliferation of rightwing populist trends, the party of [ex-leaders Jörg] Haider and Strache is a global symbol of democratic misfits – after Ibiza more than ever.”

Many commentators believe a link-up with the nationalist right remains Kurz’s personal preference, however. “The Freedom party is much more dangerous in opposition, and Kurz knows he can work with them without much of a hit to his popularity ratings,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist at Salzburg University.

“I would put the chances of Kurz entering a new pact with the Freedom party at 60:40,” Heinisch told the Guardian. “But the chances of such a coalition lasting are pretty low,” he added. Each of the four cabinets the far-right party has helped form in the postwar period has collapsed before the end of a full term.

A “grand coalition” with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ), which lies second in the polls, would produce a more stable government and has been the norm for much of the postwar period. But many Austrians associate a centrist alliance with political stasis and infighting.

Instead, Kurz could be tempted to forge a three-way coalition with the Green party and the liberal NEOS, whose leader is a former member of the ÖVP.

Nicknamed the “dirndl coalition”, an unorthodox alliance of this kind has governed the regional parliament of Salzburg since June last year, and has relatively high approval ratings: according to a recent survey by the pollster Public Opinion Strategies, 29% of Austrians said they would like to see Kurz’s party team up with the Greens and NEOS.