Preliminary final results with absentee ballots still to be counted gave Hofer 35.5 percent support, far ahead of Alexander Van der Bellen of the Greens party who ran as an independent.
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The Austrian establishment will hope they can still deny Mr Hofer the presidency by uniting behind his opponent in the run-off. The era of prolonged dominance by one or the other party is ending.
In this photo taken Tuesday, April 19, 2016 a construction site is set up in front of election posters of Andreas Kohl, candidate for presidential elections of Austrian People’s Party, OEVP, in Vienna, Austria. Political outsider Richard Lugner was last, with just over 2 per cent.
Trying to ease concerns that he would be too confrontational in office, Hofer told reporters that he would be “there for all Austrians”.
The far-Right party first came to prominence under its former leader, Jörg Haider, who notoriously spoke out in praise of the Nazi SS, saying it “deserves every honour and recognition”.
Austria also no longer has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union and Faymann’s coalition, in power since 2008, has bickered over structural reforms.
Leading opinion polls ahead of 2018 general elections with more than 30 percent is the FPOe, boosted by Europe’s migrant crisis despite a firmer line in recent months from Chancellor Werner Faymann’s government.
The approval ratings for the ruling parties have been sliding for years whereas public support for the far-right Freedom Party has been rising since the country’s regional election last year. “Hundstorfer and Khol will have to pay for their parties’ failings”, said Karin Cvrtila of pollster OGM. But according to the poll, neither the candidate of the Social Democrats nor the People’s Party could make it into a run-off on May 22.
Reinhold Lopatka, head of the OeVP bloc in parliament, said that the result “means we definitely can not go back to business as usual”. But one thing is almost certain – for the first time the victor is unlikely to be a candidate supported by either of the two mainstream parties that have dominated politics since World War II.
Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPOe) won 36.7 of the vote, projections showed, with candidates from the two governing parties failing to even make it into a runoff on May 22, projections showed. Instead of focusing on the office’s symbolic functions like past presidents, he has threatened to dismiss the government coalition and call a new national election – something no president has done since the office was newly defined after World War II.
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“The role is like that of a sleeping giant who has a lot more authority than people are aware of”, legal expert Manfried Welan told AFP.
