Voters in Austria flock to polls to reject far-right candidate

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Call it the Donald Trump effect, just not the one that pundits expected.

Austria had long been identified as the next beach that could be washed over by the populist tide that had already this year carried Mr. Trump to the White House, and the United Kingdom toward exit from the European Union. Most opinion polls ahead of Sunday's election suggested Austrians were ready to join the anti-establishment revolt and choose far-right politician Norbert Hofer as their next president.

Voters in Italy – where Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was handed a resounding defeat in Sunday's referendum on proposed constitutional changes, leading to his resignation – did indeed follow the script. But Austrians appear to have drawn a different inspiration from Mr. Trump's election. They went to the polls in unexpectedly large numbers on Sunday to reject Mr. Hofer, and to hand a narrow victory to his left-of-centre opponent, Alexander Van der Bellen.

Read more: Far-right camp concedes defeat to Van der Bellen in Austrian presidential election

Read more: Germany and Canada are the West's last safe harbours

Official results showed Mr. Van der Bellen ahead with 51.6 per cent of the vote, versus 48.3 per cent for Mr. Hofer. That margin was expected to widen as absentee ballots were counted. One projection suggested Mr. Van der Bellen would win 53.3 per cent of the final tally, and Mr. Hofer quickly conceded defeat.

Turnout looked to be in the range of 75 per cent, bucking a two-decade-long trend of declining voter participation.

"People [felt they] should vote otherwise they would wake up with Trump or Brexit," Peter Hajek, a Vienna-based pollster, told The Globe and Mail.

Mr. Van der Bellen, a former Green Party leader, actually won a May contest between the two men by an even slimmer margin – winning 50.3 per cent of the vote – before the country's Constitutional Court annulled that result on a technicality and ordered a nationwide rerun.

After the shocks of the Brexit vote and Mr. Trump's victory, there were widespread predictions that Mr. Hofer, whose Freedom Party was founded by ex-Nazi officers in the wake of the Second World War, would deliver the next big shock to Western politics. His campaign slogan of "Austria first!" echoed Mr. Trump's own call to "Make America great again."

While Austria's presidency has traditionally been a ceremonial post, Mr. Hofer made it clear he planned to do more than simply attend diplomatic functions. He suggested he would have fired the government over its handling of the 2015 refugee crisis – when hundreds of thousands of refugees and other migrants entered Austria – if he had been in office.

In a September interview with The Globe and Mail, the 45-year-old Mr. Hofer denied any connection to Nazism, but said he wanted to ban the head-to-toe burka worn by some conservative Muslim women. He also said that, if elected, he would look at options for sending many of the recently arrived asylum-seekers back to their home countries.

But after a nearly year-long election campaign, he stepped aside gracefully once the result became clear on Sunday. "I am infinitely sad that it did not work out. I would gladly have taken care of our Austria," he wrote on his Facebook page shortly after polls closed. Mr. Hofer called on his supporters to back Mr. Van der Bellen, and for "all Austrians to stick together and to work together."

Freedom Party Leader Heinz-Christian Strache told Austrian television that there would be no legal challenge of the result this time. "There are no complaints … Today we can be sure that citizens' votes were properly handled," he said.

Mr. Van der Bellen – who ran as an independent and used fears of Brexit and Mr. Trump's win to mobilize his own voter base – said his victory was proof that a politician could run on "European" ideals and win.

"A red-white-and-red signal of hope and of positive change is being beamed from Vienna through Europe," the 72-year-old said in a victory speech, referring to the colours of Austria's flag. "I will be a pro-European president of Austria open to the world."

The result was indeed greeted with relief around the continent. Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament in Brussels, said the Austrian result was "a heavy defeat of nationalism and anti-European, backward-looking populism."

Ulrich Kelber, Germany's deputy justice minister, wrote on his Twitter account that "perhaps Trump's election was the turning point. The liberal majority pushes back."

That is yet to be seen. While Mr. Van der Bellen's win will calm fears that Europe's political establishment is set to fall like a row of dominoes, the threat of more political instability remains very real.

Key elections also loom large for the Netherlands, France and Germany in the months ahead.

In the Netherlands, the far-right Party of Freedom, which has vowed to close all Islamic schools and mosques, and to pull the country out of the EU, leads most opinion polls ahead of parliamentary elections set for March.

In France, it's expected that no candidate will win the requisite 50 per cent of the vote in the April 23 first round of presidential elections. That would trigger a second-round showdown, with the two most likely candidates being François Fillon, the arch conservative recently chosen as the Republican candidate, and Marine Le Pen, the firebrand leader of the far-right Front National.

Even Austria's political direction is far from clear, despite Sunday's result.

Mr. Hofer's strong showing has the Freedom Party well-positioned to challenge for power – and the more powerful chancellor's post – in parliamentary elections scheduled for 2018.