BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st October, 2019) Austria's Sebastian Kurz is on his way to resume his interrupted chancellorship after his People's Party (OVP) came first in Sunday's general election � but he will need coalition partners, and deciding between the left and right may prove difficult.
According to preliminary results, the conservatives achieved their best score since 2002, winning 37.5 percent of the vote. The Social Democrats (SPO) came in second place at a decline with 21.3 percent, while Kurz's former allies in the Freedom Party (FPO) also slid to 16.3 percent, and plan to heal themselves in opposition. The Greens proved the EU-wide trend by surging to 13.7 percent.
The snap election came four months after the so-called Ibizagate scandal, in which the right-wing FPO's former chairman, Heinz-Christian Strache, was caught up in a sting operation while trying to organize illegal financing for his party. He then resigned in wake of the unethical behavior. Afterward, Kurz was forced to dissolve the coalition government and was put to a minority in parliament, triggering an early election.
Kurz called the six-point hike in support from the poll of 2017 "an incredible result" and assured voters that he wanted to do his "best to serve the Republic of Austria," proving that the government scandal had left his party largely unscathed.
The OVP is projected to get 71 mandates in the 183-seat lower house of parliament, meaning that Kurz needs to forge a new alliance to govern. His promises controlled immigration and tax cuts for business and families.
The coalition talks are expected to last for weeks and will be overshadowed by a looming immigration crisis, analysts warned. The former conservative-right government was the "driving force" behind the closure of the Balkan route, Claude Moniquet, the leader of Belgium's Liberal Democratic Party, told Sputnik. On the contrary, the Greens have been a vocal critic of their policies.
"The government of Chancellor Kurz with the hard-right FPO collapsed and Kurz decided to go for early elections that confirm this Sunday his dominance of traditional conservatism in Austria, a 'first line' country on the issue of immigration," Moniquet said.
The coalition with the Greens would be unprecedented for Austria. Ecologists have quadrupled their score compared to 2017, but said they would only consider a coalition with Kurz in the case of radical political change on environmental issues, immigration, poverty and pollution control.
"It seems his best chances are with the Greens on the left; but their programs are incompatible on immigration, which is again on the rise in Europe because of Turkey, and even on taxation and public spending. Kurz wants to slash public spending by 5 billion [euros], while the Greens want to spend about as much," Gilles Lebreton, a European parliament member from France's National Rally party, told Sputnik.
Only 32 percent of Green voters favor a coalition with Kurz's OVP at the moment. Proponents of this alliance are even fewer in the conservative camp � 20 percent. Such a coalition could also include the fifth-placed pro-business Neos.
A great centrist alliance with the Social Democrats headed by Pamela Rendi-Wagner seems to be the least likely option because such a "grand coalition" has been the norm for much of the period since World War Two and has come to be associated with political stasis and infighting.
The party most aligned with those goals remains the disgraced FPO. After suffering a 10-point drop in the vote from the last election, its secretary general, Harald Vilimsky, said that the anti-migration party "has no mandate to enter a new coalition with Chancellor Kurz."
Pierre Vercauteren, a professor in political science at UCLouvain university, told Sputnik that last Sunday's vote results were "very bad" for the FPO. The Ibiza scandal has dented voters' trust in the party and it would be better for Kurz to keep away from his former ally, he opined.
"Kurz had already taken a risk when he negotiated the first government with the FPO. A scalded cat fears cold water... He will surely be much more careful now, even if he tries to consider the FPO again as a partner in government," he said.
But the chairmen of the Alternative for Germany parliamentary group in the German parliament, Alice Weidel and Alexander Gauland, reassured the Austrian fellow right-wing party and wished the FPO "success in its reorganization" after the painful blow at the ballot box.
"Despite the setback, the FPO continues to play a decisive role in Austrian politics. It is and remains a guarantor of a policy that consistently represents the interests of citizens," Alice Weidel told German media.
