Referendum on EU Membership May Become Vienna's 'Last Resort'

Member of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria Norbert Hofer said that the European Union is going to rework the EU contracts because of the Brexit.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — If the European Union continues to move toward the centralization of power after the so-called Brexit, Austria will have to react by holding its own referendum, member of the far-right Freedom Party of Austria Norbert Hofer told Sputnik on Tuesday.

"If the renewing of the European Union from the inside out is not successful, there is a referendum as a last resort. If the Union will not leave the wrong way of centralization, it should lead in Austria automatically to a referendum, because this is a radical change of our constitution," Hofer, who narrowly missed out on winning the Austrian presidential election last month, said.

According to Austrian law, any major change to the Federal Constitution automatically triggers the calling of a referendum at a federal level. The last time such a mandatory popular vote was held in 1994 on the matter of Austria’s accession to the European Union.

"We assume that the European Union is going to rework the EU contracts because of the Brexit," Hofer noted.

The Austrian Freedom Party is currently contesting the results of the presidential elections in the country's Constitutional Court, with claims of irregularities in the procedure of counting postal ballots.

On June 23, UK citizens voted by a very slight margin for the country to withdraw from the European Union, contributing to a rise in the Eurosceptic mood in the bloc. The idea of Austria leaving the European Union has been already dubbed by media "Auxit", or Oexit" in reference to the country's name in German — Oesterreich.