“The victory of the Austria’s Freedom Party candidate [will] be regarded as an overall victory for the euroscpetic political right,” Ronald Glaser said.
On Sunday, Austria held the second round of the presidential elections. According to preliminary results, announced late on Sunday, Norbert Hofer from the Freedom Party (FPO), got some 51.9 percent of the votes, while his rival — Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent candidate, backed by the Green Party, secured 48.1 percent of the votes. Some 900,000 postal votes are now being counted.
Hofer has been campaigning on anti-immigrant and anti-EU platform. During his election campaign, Hofer has sharply criticized the EU-Turkey deal aimed at tackling the migrant flow. He has called for further limits to be put on migrant numbers and stricter rules for asylum seekers as well as for the two-party system that has dominated Austrian politics for the past several decades to be broken up.
