Polls had shown the Socialists ahead by only a few percentage points before the vote, with concerns about immigration a major issue for voters. The Austrian capital has been led by the SPO for most of the past 70 years.
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The preliminary results showed the Green party with almost 12 percent support. Each party gained seven, nine and five seats in the city council respectively.
Top candidate for the local elections in Vienna Heinz Christian Strache from the right-wing Freedom Party, FPOE, informs the media in front of a polling station in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, October 11, 2015.
Although they didn’t win, their garnering of nearly a third of votes gave the governing Socialists a fight.
Support for The Freedom Party leaped to 31 percent, up more than five percentage points from the last election five years ago. Final results, not counting absentee voting, were expected later Sunday.
The worst result was for the centre-right People’s Party, the SPOe’s coalition partner at federal level, which saw its score fall to 9.3 percent, below 10 percent for the first time. Neos, a liberal party, was on 5-7 percent.
With another five-year term for his Socialists a virtual certainty, Vienna Mayor Michael Haeupl said he could “could live well” with the results.
Heinz-Christian Strache, 46, the party’s leader, known as “HC”, hailed the result as “historic”. “You can not dismiss” the party’s best-ever showing, he said.
Analysts said Mr Strache’s portrayal of the election as a “revolution” and a “duel” with Mr Haeupl, as well as his party’s anti-migrant message, helped the Socialists win by a larger-than-projected margin.
The Freedom Party already has made huge gains in several provincial elections this year, at the expense of the Socialists and the centrist People’s Party, but it hasn’t won outright.
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The SPO has governed the city since the founding of the new republic.
