VIENNA — In his office in Austria’s grand old Parliament, Norbert Hofer, the man who would be Austria’s next president, presents himself as anything but a threat.

He enters with a pronounced limp as a result of a 2003 paragliding accident. He air-kisses a visitor’s hand. He then spends much of the next hour professing that he is not nationalist and certainly not anti-Semitic, insists that he is too young to have anything to do with Nazism and says that he is no part of any populist wave.

Yet Mr. Hofer, 45, also flashes a boyish grin and can hardly help but betray an extra air of confidence these days. In a year of political shocks, this may be the shape of the next.

Mr. Hofer, a leading light in the right-wing Freedom Party, is counting on Austrians to make him the first far-right head of state in post-World War II Europe when they vote on Sunday, the final act in a yearlong tussle that has turned into a contest to mold the fate of the Continent’s heart.