Charismatic face of far-Right on brink of Austrian presidency
Hofer could win office tomorrow amid disquiet in the country about growing number of migrants
MUSLIM women clutching their children’s hands looked on nervously as a far-Right candidate on the verge of the Austrian presidency brought his campaign to one of Vienna’s most diverse neighbourhoods yesterday.
Supporters chanted Norbert Hofer’s name as immigrant shopkeepers looked on. “I will not only be president of Austria, I will be a president for Austrians,” Mr Hofer, the Freedom Party candidate, told his final rally before Sunday’s vote.
His opponent, Alexander van der Bellen, ended his campaign with a different promise to a country where 21 per cent are of immigrant background, pledging to be a “president for everyone who lives in Austria”.
The election for the country’s largely ceremonial presidency has left Austria deeply divided and in political crisis.
Earlier this week, a crowd of protesters gathered outside the president’s official residence at the Hofburg palace, beneath the balcony where a victorious Hitler addressed crowds celebrating the Anschluss with Germany in 1938.
“No Nazis in the Hofburg,” the banners they carried read.
“I think we must never allow people like Hofer back into power,” a 22-yearold student who gave her name only as Rosalie said. “Especially when you consider our history.”
The election campaign has already claimed the scalp of the long-serving chancellor, Werner Faymann, who resigned after his party’s candidate failed to make it past the first round.
The two men left standing could not be more different.
The media savvy Mr Hofer has made great play of carrying his Glock pistol along the campaign trail with him, and has dominated the news coverage with an anti-immigrant message.
Mr van der Bellen, an independent candidate endorsed by the Green Party, is at the opposite end of the political spectrum.
His supporters wear T-shirts proclaiming him as Öbama — or Austria’s answer to President Obama.
But the former economics professor is uncomfortable and awkward before the cameras, and famously told one in- terviewer his first plan for after the election was to get his teeth cleaned.
On the eve of the election, no one knows which of these two will win. The polling companies got the first round so wrong they have refused to publish predictions this time.
Just about the only thing that is clear is how Austria got into this situation.
“He is the only one who will stop the migrants,” Mr Hofer’s election posters declare. In a country where some 90,000 asylum-seekers arrived last year, the migrant crisis has dominated the election.
Mr Hofer has pledged to use the powers of the presidency to ensure the influx stops. Mr van der Bellen opposes even the current government’s attempts to limit the numbers.
“This didn’t start with the migrant crisis,” says Thomas Hofer, a political analyst who is not related to the candidate.
The Freedom Party has been rising in the polls for several years on a wave of disaffection with the established parties, he says.
“They came close to winning the last national elections in 2013,” he says. “But the migrant crisis has accelerated the process.”
It has left the two parties which have dominated Austrian politics since the Second World War reeling, after both their candidates were eliminated in the first round.
And it has brought the far-Right to the brink of the country’s presidency for the first time since 1945.