Exit polls indicate Austria’s far-right party has won historic first national election after tapping into voters’ fears of immigration and the Ukraine war.
The projection for ORF public television, based on partial counting, put support for the Freedom Party at 29.1% and for Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party at 26.2%. The centre-left Social Democrats were in third place with 20.4%.
The exit poll is believed to be accurate to within plus or minus 1.5 %.
The party appears to have successfully tapped into voters’ anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other concerns following recent gains for the hard right elsewhere in Europe.
Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and long-time campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, wants to become Austria’s new chancellor. He has used the term “Volkskanzler,” or chancellor of the people, which was used by the Nazis to describe Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Kickl has rejected the comparison.
But to become Austria’s new leader, he will now need a coalition partner to command a majority in the lower house of parliament.
More than 6.3 million people age 16 were eligible to vote for the new parliament in Austria, a European Union member that has a policy of military neutrality.
Kickl has achieved a turnaround since Austria’s last parliamentary election in 2019. In June, the Freedom Party narrowly won a nationwide vote for the first time in the European Parliament election, which also brought gains for other European far-right parties.
In 2019, its support slumped to 16.2% after a scandal brought down a government in which it was the junior coalition partner. Then-vice chancellor and Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned following the publication of a secretly recorded video in which he appeared to offer favours to a purported Russian investor.
The far right tapped into voter frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the Covid pandemic. It also been able to build on worries about migration.
In its election programme, the Freedom Party called for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” and for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an “emergency law.”
Gernot Bauer, a journalist with Austrian magazine Profil who recently co-published an investigative biography of the far-right leader, said that under Kickl’s leadership, the Freedom Party has moved “even further to the right,” as Kickl refused to explicitly distance the party from the Identitarian Movement, a pan-European nationalist and far-right group.
Bauer describes Kickl’s rhetoric as “aggressive” and says some of his language is deliberately provocative.
The Freedom Party also calls for an end to sanctions against Russia, is highly critical of western military aid to Ukraine and wants to bow out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.
The final result will be published on Monday after postal votes have also counted.
