Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Austrian parliamentary election tomorrow



As mentioned earlier, the Austrian electorate to go the polls tomorrow to elect their Parliament. The latest polls seem to be showing a very split electorate. The SPO and the OVP are pretty close together in the upper 20s. Neither party seems to have broken 30% in the last few polls. This does imply that the next parliament will be quite a fragmented one and that complicated coalition-making may be necessary.

The Freedom Party, having declined from its peak in the 1990s, has now risen in the polls again. It is just short of 20% in the opinion polls and so, if you assume that the polls understate them because of their hard-right nature and the consequent public embarrassment to admit supporting them, then they could well get close on 25% support. That is more or less what they got in 1999 when they pushed the OVP into third place.

The Greens are polling just over 10%. This thus means that they will probably come fourth, edging ahead of the former Freedom Party characters in the BZO (Movement for the Future of Austria). However, an SPO/Green coalition now looks mathematically unlikely to win - unless there is a huge last minute swing to the left.

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