Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) has emerged victorious after the country’s parliamentary election on Sunday.Here’s what comes next.
What were the results of the Austria election?
According to a projection based on the count of nearly all the votes by pollster Foresight for Austrian public broadcaster ORF:
The FPO won 28.8 percent of the vote.
The conservative Austrian People’s Party (OVP) is in second place with 26.3 percent votes. The OVP has been in a governing coalition with the Green Party.
The centre-left Social Democrats (SPO) won 21.1 percent of the vote.
What does the FPO need to form the government?
While the FPO won the most votes, it did not win with a large enough margin to govern alone.
To form the government, a party requires a minimum of 92 out of 183 seats in the parliament, a number that Herbert Kickl’s FPO falls short of.
So the FPO “can only form a government if it enters a coalition with at least one other party”, Dorit Geva, a professor at the University of Vienna, told Al Jazeera.
Will the OVP form a coalition government with the FPO?
Most parties in Austria have refused to join hands with the FPO. The OVP, on the other hand, has been more nuanced in response to the question of whether it might back the FPO in government.
During the election campaign, OVP leader and Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer said the party would not support the FPO if the far-right party insisted on making its leader, Herbert Kickl, the chancellor.
However, Nehammer never refused to enter into a coalition with the FPO, Geva said, adding that ther …