One month after entering into a coalition to govern the country’s largest state—and as it continues to top the national polls—the conservative, anti-globalist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has achieved the best result in the party’s history in this weekend’s state election in Salzburg.
Although the establishment, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) maintained its top position in Salzburg’s state election on Sunday, April 24th, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) emerged as the clear victor, becoming the second strongest party after increasing in share of the vote by 7.1% to reach 25.9%, Der Standard reports.
30-year-old Marlene Svazek, the FPÖ’s top candidate in Salzburg, told the Austrian press that the election results indicated that “people want a change.”
Svazek, the only woman among the state chairmen of the FPÖ, called on the ÖVP not to form a “coalition of losers,” saying: “If you respect the will of the voters, then the only conclusion can only be that you have serious talks with the Freedom Party about a coalition in this federal state.”
Together, the FPÖ and the ÖVP occupy two-thirds of the state parliament’s seats. Herbert Kickl, the national leader of the FPÖ, said that the election’s results marked “a new political age in Salzburg.”
For the first time since 1945, the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ), one of the world’s oldest communist parties, re-entered the Landtag, or state parliament, with 11.7% of the vote.
Meanwhile, the ÖVP—which in two of the previous three state elections, Tyrol and Lower Austria, lost nearly double-digit support—saw its share of the vote in Salzburg sink to 30.4% after dropping 7.4% from the previous election.
The left-liberal Greens and NEOs—the ÖVP’s previous coalition partners in Salzburg’s state government—also lost, with NEOs, whose support dropped to 4.2% from 7.3%, failing to reach the 5% threshold to reenter the Landtag, Support for the Greens, meanwhile, dropped to 8.2% from 9.3%.
Wilfried Haslauer, the national leader of NEOs, described the result as “very painful.”
Support for the leftist-establishment Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) also declined, dropping from 20.0% in the state’s previous election to 17.9%. The result is the SPÖ’s worst since 1945. The party is now the third-strongest in the state.
Sunday’s result, which saw the FPÖ become the most popular party among 18 to 59-year-olds, continues a trend that has seen the FPÖ make significant gains in state elections in Tyrol, Lower Austria, and Carinthia, while the ÖVP, SPÖ, Greens, and NEOs have all suffered considerable defeats.
As the strongest party in the country, according to the latest polls—and with its successes in state elections in Tyrol, Lower Austria, and Carinthia—it is likely that an increasingly broad segment of the Austrian population is supportive of positions taken only by the Freedom Party.
Presently, the FPÖ is the only party represented in the Austrian parliament that opposes economic sanctions against Russia. During the pandemic, it was the only major party to oppose the government’s draconian lockdown regime and mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations. The FPÖ is the country’s only party that has, over many years, consistently sought to enact radical changes to stop illegal mass migration.
