Elections started this Sunday in Austria parliamentariansto which they are summoned 6.34 million citizens with the right to vote and that they could find themselves, according to the polls, for the first time in the history of the country with a victory for the ultranationalists.
The first polling stations open at 06:00 local time (04:00 GMT) and the last to close will do so at 5:00 p.m. local time, when the first results projections are expected. According to the latest polls, the ultranationalist liberal party FPÖ, with former Interior Minister Herbert Kickl In the lead, it displays a voting intention of 26%, one percentage point more than the ruling popular party ÖVP, winner of the 2019 elections with 37.5%.
Third in the polls, the social-democratic SPÖ party, with 21% of voting intentions, ahead of the liberal NEOS party, with 12%. While, The environmental Greens, partners of the ÖVP in the current government coalition, they would reach 8% of the votes, or six points less than five years ago.
The electoral campaign was marked first by the nationalist, eurosceptic and xenophobic messages of the FPÖ then by the serious floods which devastated the east of the country. The management of this natural disaster by the current Federal Chancellor, the conservative Karl Nehammer, gave him a little strength in the home stretch of the campaign.
Thus, the ÖVP seems to have considerably narrowed the gap with the FPÖ, which had led opinion polls for over a year with up to 30% voting intention.
