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Far-right candidate concedes in Austrian election
A leftwing, independent candidate has narrowly prevented Austria from becoming the first European Union country to elect a far-right head of state after a knife-edge contest ended with his opponent conceding defeat.
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Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka announced the results Monday in Vienna, revealing that Van der Bellen had won 50.3% of the ballot (2,254,484 votes) to Hofer’s 49.7% (2,223,458 votes). Mr Van der Bellen said he did not want Austria to be led by a “populist right-wing, pan-Germanic fraternity member” and even urged voters “who don’t like me but perhaps like Hofer even less to vote for me”.
He asked his supporters not to be “disheartened” and said their commitment in the election campaign was “not lost but an investment for the future”.
He was sworn in earlier this month after fellow Social Democrat Werner Faymann quit over the historic first-round defeat in the presidential race of the long-powerful SPOe and their coalition partner, the centre-right People’s Party.
Van der Bellen will replace outgoing President Heinz Fischer of the Social Democrats (SPOe) on July 8.
Hofer’s rise in Austria sent shock waves across the European Union, which has been struggling to find answers to the surge of more than a million refugees who have arrived in the past year from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other troubled spots. Only a little more than 31,000 votes separated the two, out of more than 4.6 million votes cast. Mr Hofer and the Freedom Party have some deeply unsettling connections to unsavoury groups in Austrian society which no amount of carefully staged visits to Israel can camouflage. “The entire encrusted political system stood up against Hofer”, he said. Last year, Austria received around 90,000 asylum requests, the second-highest in the European Union on a per capita basis, from refugees from the Middle East and North Africa fleeing violence and poverty. “Unfortunately, the dissatisfaction with the moderate mainstream parties is providing oxygen to those like Hofer” and the Austrian Freedom Party.
Hofer’s defeat averts an embarrassing setback for Europe’s political establishment, which is increasingly under threat from populist parties that have profited from concerns about the region’s refugee crisis and years of weak growth and high unemployment.
The 72-year old retired economics professor and former Green Party leader won with a miniscule margin of just 0.4 percentage points, according to local media.
He beat the far-right candidate Norbert Hofer, who was the favourite and whose election would have been a first in the EU.
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This was due to public disillusionment with the centrist parties – seen as too “cozy” and “complacent” – combined with the migrant crisis, which had been a key issue on the campaign trail, over which Van der Bellen and Hofer had clashed.