03 October 2006
Austria's Social Democrats have scored a narrow victory over the ruling People's Part of chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel. Sunday's election also brought a surge of the two rival far-right parties which led an anti-immigrant election campaign. Schüssel, whose controversial decision to include Carinthia governor Jörg Haider's far-right movement into a governing coalition led to international isolation of Austria in 2000/01, is now likely to lose his post as chancellor to Alfred Gusenbauer of the Social Democratic SPÖ, which score 35.7 per cent of the vote. "I never expected this," Schüssel told his supporters while urging them to accept the result, adding: "The voter is always right."
Whilst it is theoretically possible that Schüssel's ÖVP party forms a coalition with the two right-wing parties, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) which scored 11.2 per cent of the vote, and Haider's spin-off Alliance for Austria's Future (BZÖ) party, which just scraped into parliament by surpassing the 4 per cent threshold, observers believe that a grand coalition of the two main parties SPÖ and ÖVP is the most likely option. The two far-right parties had resorted to vigorous anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign, with the head of the BZÖ demanding that 300,000 foreigners be deported. Justice Minister Karin Gastinger left the Alliance shortly before the election because of the party's xenophobic attitude.