Viewed from the sunny hills of the Kaunertal valley, the outcome of Sunday’s Austrian presidential election rerun is a foregone conclusion. In May, 85.1% of voters there supported the Green-backed candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, who had grown up in the valley as the son of Estonian refugees. It was his best result anywhere in Austria.

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But in the Tyrolian Alps, echo chambers are a pre-digital, geological reality. One valley to the west, in Spiss, Van der Bellen’s opponent, the far-right populist Norbert Hofer, scored his best result. In the village perched on the Swiss border, 87.5% of voters rooted for a candidate who has said he would have dissolved the parliament that presided over last year’s refugee crisis, vowed to call a referendum on EU membership if the bloc of states takes further steps towards integration and hinted he could imagine a plebiscite on reintroducing the death penalty.

The divide between Kaunertal and Spiss reflects a wider split across a country in which one half is increasingly struggling to understand the other. In May’s runoff election, the two candidates were separated only by a few thousand votes, with Van der Bellen narrowly ahead. In July the constitutional court overturned the result due to “irregularities” in the processing of the postal vote.

On Sunday the outcome is expected to be similarly tight. Officials are under instructions not to cut corners, to avoid a repeat of the May fiasco, so some pollsters say they don’t expect the presidency to be called until Tuesday.

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When Hofer’s Freedom party (FPÖ) succeeded in its bid to force a rerun, frustration with a divisive and costly election campaign was running high and many expected it to backfire.

But recent surveys suggest Hofer may be able to swing the contest in his favour this time around: of the last nine polls, seven showed him in the lead and only one pointed to a win for Van der Bellen. “The more accustomed people have become to seeing Hofer’s smile on TV, the less they think of him as a rightwing extremist,” said Benedikt Narodoslawsky, of Falter magazine.

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s triumph in the US have emboldened the Freedom party, which governed Austria in a coalition with the conservative ÖVP between 2000 and 2005. Some senior FPÖ politicians were invited to an election-night party at Trump Tower in New York.

As in the US, Austrian supporters of the far-right candidate have used social media to spread rumours about their opponent’s health. The FPÖ leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, who has 400,000 followers on Facebook, recently shared a badly lit screenshot of Van der Bellen suggesting the 72-year old had forgotten to shave half his face. “What else does he forget?” Strache asked.

In Unzensuriert.at, the Austrian far-right has its own equivalent of Breitbart News, railing against Muslims, the EU and biased mainstream media. And if you type “presidential vote Austria” into German-language Google, two of the top three results are official-looking websites that turn out to be run by the head of Austria’s Eurosceptic EU Exit party, dismissing both candidates as “cheats”.

In an attempt to improve on May’s results, both candidates have tried to fire up those who did not vote last time, leading them back to the regions where mood is already most polarised. Landeck, where both the villages of Kaunertal and Spiss are located, had the lowest turnout last time, at 62.1%.

Tyrol used to be a relatively poor, agricultural region until the 1960s, when it began to benefit from a tourism boom. The EU’s eastward expansion provided a further boost. These days tourists from not just Britain and Germany but also Poland and the Czech Republic come to explore the Tyrolian valleys. In 2014, more tourists visited the region than Greece.

Kaunertal, where posters bearing Van der Bellen’s face and slogan (“Sanity instead of extremism”) vastly outnumber those of Hofer (“With heart and soul for Austria: so help me God”), has become the standout example of Tyrol’s economic upswing.

Since the former mayor Eugen Larcher managed to convince authorities to open up the nearby glacier to skiers and hikers in the 1960s, the valley has become an upmarket slow-travel destination: close to nearby skiing pistes but not overrun by tourists, with high-speed broadband and a newly built spa.

“People often tell us we live at the arse-end of the world,” said the ex-mayor’s son Martin Larcher, 46, who runs a smart hotel in the centre of the village. “That used to be a negative, but now people seem to like it.”

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Van der Bellen’s personal connection to the area may be the key factor behind his overwhelming support here, even if the visible effects of climate change on Kaunertal’s glacier have opened up the traditionally conservative-voting region to green ideas. “People appreciate Sascha,” said Josef Raich, the current mayor, using an informal contraction of Van der Bellen’s first name. “He’s calm, unassuming, completely normal. He’s never tried to force his ideology on me, and he accepts that people around here are deeply religious even though he is an agnostic.”

Hofer, on the other hand, “comes across as someone who is driven by his party, and the Freedom party thrives on fear and populist rhetoric,” said Raich. Specifically, he was concerned about Hofer’s previous comments on relations with South Tyrol. In 2015, Hofer called for the independent province in northern Italy – once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire – to be integrated into the Austrian state, and he has since proposed offering dual nationality to citizens of the autonomous province.

Those comments on South Tyrol showed that “he doesn’t think like a European”, Raich said. “There’s no economic advantage in joining Austria for South Tyrol – the borders are already open anyway. And ideologically we are all Europeans here.”

In Spiss, half an hour’s drive away, the same comments have won Hofer support. “South Tyrol belongs to Austria, it’s the same culture, shaped by the Alps,” said Doris Nandin, who lets out two of the floors of her home to tourists and works in a hotel in nearby skiing resort of Samnaun. Her husband, she said, had recently bought a T-shirt that read: “Let’s swap South Tyrol for Vienna.”

But the main reason she supported Hofer was the refugees. “I don’t think it’s fair that the refugees are being inundated with money while we are cutting pensions for our grandparents,” Nandin said.

She acknowledged there were no refugees in Spiss, a community of no more than 133 inhabitants. Last year the community voted against accepting the government’s quota, but two families volunteered to take in a family each. By then the numbers coming into Austria had dropped and the offer was rejected.

Yet reports of the handling of last year’s crisis had shaken Nandin’s faith in the government. “It’s complete chaos here in Austria. Isn’t it shocking that women can no longer walk home on their own at night unless they carry a can of pepper spray?”

To describe Spiss as one of the losers of globalisation would be inaccurate. Like the area as a whole, the village has benefited from free movement to and from neighbouring states. But the tourism boom of the second half of the 20th century looks less sustainable here than in Kaunertal.

Whereas hotels are already up and running in the valley down the road, the skiing season in Spiss has yet to start. Restaurants are shut, hotels are empty, and government red tape such as the smoking ban and allergen labelling requirements are frequently cited as reasons for poor returns.

While Kaunertal plans to join up skiing areas with South Tyrol in 2018, Spiss is burdened with the harder Swiss border, where customs officers go as far as controlling the piste between Samnauen and Ischgl on skis. Some of the locals have to continue running small sheep farms on the icy hills.

Alois Jäger, the mayor of Spiss, rejected the idea that the local economy had driven support for Hofer, pointing to the refugee crisis and Van der Bellen’s age as key factors instead. He didn’t think the outcome of the election would change much for his village. Next week Hofer may become Europe’s first far-right president of the post-war era, but Jäger believed protests from other EU member states would prevent him from doing anything too extreme.

He may have been trying to be diplomatic. In May, Jäger confided, he was one of the five people in Spiss who cast their vote for Van der Bellen instead.