The Freedom Party was headed for the first far-right win in a national parliamentary election in post-World War II Austria on Sunday, finishing ahead of the governing conservatives after tapping into voters’ anxieties about immigration, inflation, Ukraine and other issues, a projection showed. But its chances of governing were unclear.
A projection for ORF public television, based on counting of over 90% of the votes, put support for the Freedom Party at 28.9% and Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party at 26.3%. The center-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21%. The outgoing government — a coalition of Nehammer’s party and the environmentalist Greens — lost its majority in the lower house of parliament.
The far right has benefited from frustration over high inflation, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. It has also built on worries about migration.
In its election program, titled “Fortress Austria,” the Freedom Party calls for “remigration of uninvited foreigners,” for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an emergency law.
The White House said on Sunday it had not been warned in advance of the airstrike...
It was billed as a decisive week for Ukraine.
A chance for President Volodymyr Zelensky to present...
On Saturday, Day 358 of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in the devastated, destroyed, and...
Hassan Nasrallah, the revered and reviled longtime leader of Hezbollah, was killed Friday in an Israeli...
