After the Netherlands and Sweden, another stunning electoral surge for the extreme right in Vienna, a city where the centre-left views governance as its birthright.

"Red Vienna" has been a socialist and then social democratic stronghold since the 1920s. There was never any chance of Michael Häupl, the incumbent and long-serving SPÖ (social democratic) mayor, losing his job. But the customary absolute majority in Vienna's gargantuan mock-gothic town hall is gone, perhaps for a long time. That makes yesterday's vote a bit of a watershed.

Former dental technician Heinz-Christian Strache, the loud extreme right leader who is heir to the late Jörg Haider, was the real winner of the poll. He came second with a staggering 27% to the SPÖ's 44%. That is the social democrats' worst result since 1996, when Haider was in his prime, and the second worst result ever.

All the mainstream parties took a hiding. The SPÖ dropped almost 5 points, the Christian democrats of the Austrian People's party slumped 5.5 and the Greens fell by 2.5 - while Strache's Freedom party added a staggering 12 points to almost double its vote.

A full district by district results breakdown is available at the Vienna website.

As with the far-right Sweden Democrats in working class parts of Malmo a few weeks back, Strache struck gold by mining the leftwing vote in Vienna's old industrial white working class areas, now heavily populated by immigrant families.

He captured more than a third of the vote in some of these districts - 37% in Simmering and Floridsdorf and 35% in Favoriten.

These kind of results lead to overheated scaremongering about the 1930s, when the left and the right - led by Austromarxists and Austrofascists (more Mussolini than Hitler until the Germans took over in 1938) - fought pitched battles on Vienna's streets.

Fat chance of that these days in a prosperous city that is exceptionally well-run and regularly tops international quality of life surveys.

But mayor Häupl is humiliated. Kronen Zeitung, the must-read tabloid newspaper that has nourished the rise of the far right for more than 20 years, dubbed the next Vienna government a "losers' coalition".

Strache's populism struck a chord. With minor local variations, the winning topics are almost identical for the far right across Europe - Islamophobia and anti-immigration.

Strache ran strongly on banning minarets - as had the right in next-door Switzerland - though there is only one in the Austrian capital. He also wanted to ban Islamic headgear, as the right had pledged to do in the Netherlands. More specifically, he pledged to keep the city's blood Viennese.

As part of its campaigning, his party recently gave away computer games in which the player shoots at mosques, minarets and muezzin. Not very subtle, to be sure. But highly effective.