Support for Austria’s Freedom party (FPÖ) has plunged by more than a third as voters punished the far-right group in national elections for a corruption scandal that brought down the government.
The former chancellor Sebastian Kurz, 33, looks certain to reclaim his position as the youngest leader in the world after his conservative People’s party (ÖVP) secured 37.1% of the vote – its best result since 2002.
The Green party was the other big winner, achieving its best result at national elections with 14%. The centre-left Social Democratic party (SPÖ) plummeted to a historically low 21.7% but was still the second-biggest party.
The FPÖ – whose former leader Heinz-Christian Strache resigned after a covertly filmed video showed the then vice-chancellor offering lucrative public contracts in exchange for campaign support to a woman he believed to be the niece of a Russian oligarch – came third with 16.1%, a drop of about 10 percentage points.
The Green party, which in 2017 failed to get over the 4% threshold for the first time since 1983, gained 10.2 percentage points to re-enter parliament, fuelling speculation Kurz could invite it to form a government, possibly in a three-way alliance with the pro-business, liberal NEOS party, which took 7.8%.
With Strache banished from office and the FPÖ under new leadership, a renewed alliance between the conservatives and the far right was considered the most likely outcome, when the party performed considerably worse than expected. On Austrian television, its general secretary, Harald Vilimsky, said FPÖ had “no mandate” to enter another coalition with Kurz.
The FPÖ was the only party not to be invited to hustings organised specifically for Austria’s Jewish community. Bini Guttmann, the incoming president of the European Union of Jewish Students, described the party as “structurally antisemitic”.
