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At the Heinz-Christian Strache party, the HC team, shortly before the first extrapolation, still clung to the principle of hope: the votes were only finally counted on Monday, entry into the Vienna state parliament would certainly continue to work, Strache was exactly the candidate of the right, said party founder and member of the Vienna Landtag, Karl Baron defiantly. If the HC team failed, it was because of the “imperfections”, that is, the insults and defamations against the party leader.
But shortly after 6pm at the latest, when the ORF presented its first reasonably reliable figures, things seemed to be over: 3.6 percent for the HC team; According to the survey experts, there was only a “theoretical possibility” that Strache, the former vice chancellor and former leader of the FPÖ, could remain in politics with a member of parliament.
In Vienna, the once-influential right-wing populist was expected with some anticipation, announcing his retirement from politics after the Ibiza video was released in spring 2019, and a few months later announcing his retirement. Politicians in the federal state of Vienna and in the federal government were equally excited to see how the FPÖ performed, and now it is licking its wounds: 7.7 percent, minus 23.1 percentage points, which has rarely happened in electoral history. from Austria. In the city, the Freedom Party paid, among other things, the price for the serious upheavals in which Strache had plunged his party with the Ibiza cause; they also raced with the young and rather unknown candidate Dominik Nepp. But since the ÖVP, which could double its result with leading candidate Gernot Blümel, who is also finance minister, to 18.9 percentage points, competed for votes in the field of the right and thus campaigned In three parties on migration and integration issues, the right-wing populists stayed with the FPÖ, which called itself the “original”, it has little space. The ÖVP celebrated the increase with enthusiasm; however, in 2015 it had an unusually poor result. Blümel explicitly thanked Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who played an important role in the result.
And so the remainder of the otherwise unexciting election night unfolded primarily with coalition speculation: whether Mayor Michael Ludwig, who expected a solid performance for the SPÖ and, based on extrapolation, could get the 42 percent of the vote, would you continue to form a coalition with the Greens, which would increase 2.3 percentage points to 14 percent and would you like to remain in city government? Green Deputy Mayor Birgit Hebein explained the result as a “clear mandate to continue.”
The SPÖ was also able to get close to the Liberal Neos, who achieved just under eight percent and thus an improvement in their results. Or perhaps the ÖVP, which, with its current election results, could be too strong a partner. Ludwig spoke monosyllabically on the coalition issue in the early afternoon: there are no definitive figures yet and he will probe the intersections with all the parties concerned.
On Sunday morning, the mayor went to his voting center in Floridsdorf, instead of voting by mail, as was the case with a record 382,000 Viennese. 1.34 million eligible voters were summoned for the city parliament and 23 district governments. Votes by mail will not be counted until this Monday, so one issue or another, which made the election beyond the two million metropolises exciting, will probably only be clarified at the beginning of the week.
Above all, the question of how the sharp increase in crown numbers influences the behavior of voters and how the pandemic would affect the outcome was discussed in advance. For months, Federal Chancellor Kurz’s ÖVP has been raising spirits against the crisis management of the Viennese SPÖ, which in turn indignantly rejected voices critical of federal policy.
