The centre of political gravity in Austria shifted to the right after the conservative Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) came out top in national elections, making its 31-year-old leader, Sebastian Kurz, the world’s youngest head of government.

Projections on Sunday night put the ÖVP ahead with 31.7% of the vote. The incumbent chancellor Christian Kern’s centre-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) were relegated to second place with 27% of the vote, while the far-right FPÖ took 25.9%, failing to match its best-ever result.

For the first time in Austria’s history, the two rightwing parties both managed to increase their seats tally without taking votes off each other.

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The result represents a triumph for Kurz, who has turned around his party’s fortunes and said he was “overwhelmed” with the result, vowing to introduce to the country a “new political culture” of togetherness under his leadership.

The Vienna-born politician will probably be tasked with forming the next government, potentially in coalition with the FPÖ, a far-right party founded by a former Nazi functionary and SS member after the second world war.

Critics argue that Kurz, whose manifesto has called for lower taxes and tougher measures against “political Islam”, only achieved his victory by embracing a divisive agenda dictated by the far-right. Of ÖVP voters, 55% said they had picked the party because of its stance on asylum and integration policies.



The shift in Austria’s political landscape comes less than a year after the FPÖ’s Norbert Hofer was beaten in the presidential vote by a Green-backed candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen.

Kern called elections in May after months of deadlock over policy disputes between the SPÖ and ÖVP, which have jointly governed Austria in a “grand coalition” for the last decade.

While Sunday’s result would mathematically allow a continuation of the coalition, the election campaign has not just seen Kurz’s People’s Party drift to the right but sparked an increasingly ugly war of words between the former allies, intensified by allegations of “dirty campaigning”. Any rapprochement between the two parties would require deft diplomacy and could undermine Kurz’s platform for change.

Kern, a former head of Austria’s state-run railway operator who took over as chancellor in May 2016, has previously indicated that he would prefer to go into opposition if his party came second. On Sunday, he stated that he expected Kurz to quickly come to a coalition agreement with the FPÖ.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sebastian Kurz arrives for a TV interview in Vienna, Austria, on 15 October 2017. Photograph: Christian Bruna/EPA

Neither centre party has categorically ruled out a coalition with the far-right FPÖ, which formed a government with the SPÖ in 1983 and the ÖVP in 2000 – a move that was met at the time with outrage and economic sanctions from Israel and several EU member states.

Under its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, who took charge of the FPÖ after a split in 2005, it switched from a broader anti-immigration message to more targeted anti-Islam rhetoric. In a recent TV debate, Strache called for Austria to join the Visegrád group of central European states whose borders overlap with the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian empire.

Speaking on Austrian TV on Sunday night, Strache described the result as a “great victory” and a sign of a “desire for change”, even though his party’s projected result falls considerably short of the support the FPÖ commanded in polls at the height of the refugee crisis.

A “dirndl coalition” between the ÖVP, the Greens and the liberal party Neos, mirroring a political constellation currently being debated in neighbouring Germany, looked likely to fall short of a majority.

The Green party experienced a disastrous evening after a recent party split, and found itself on the verge of failing to meet the 4% hurdle for entering parliament for the first time in 38 years. Meanwhile the Peter Pilz List, a party founded by a former Green parliamentarian, looked likely to enter parliament for the first time.



The Social Democrats, who have been governing as senior coalition partners for the last decade but led a campaign marked by blunders and scandals, will view the result with mixed feelings.

While the SPÖ’s overall share of the vote decreased, the party managed to improve its performance in the capital, Vienna, where it emerged as the strongest party and gained 3 percentage points, and achieved a better result than first exit polls had indicated.

Kern was received with loud cheers at his party’s headquarters, where he emphasised that he had improved the SPÖ’s share of the vote in spite of a “brutal” rightwing agenda pushed by other parties and the media.



The SPÖ’s pitch as a progressive alternative to the right-leaning policies proposed by Kurz’s conservatives and the far right was undermined by revelations that an adviser to the party had paid for a group of websites churning out xenophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories in order to discredit its main challenger, Kurz, in the eyes of far-right supporters.



The Schmutzkübel (dirt bucket) scandal, which rocked Austrian politics two weeks ago, centred on at least two Facebook sites posting Photoshopped images and video clips that accused Kurz of secretly paving the way for a new wave of immigration from Islamic countries, and of being part of the “dubious political network” of the Hungarian-American financier George Soros.

