Looking at their national elections website , the preliminary results from today's Austrian parliamentary elections can be seen.
The SPO have managed to come first. But they only got around 29.7% of the votes cast. This is down from the 35% they got last time. This is probably the first time in Austrian democratic history that the winning party has got less than 30%. It shows that the electorate is becoming more fragmented.
In the 1970s, the SPO was a lot more popular. It broke the 50% barrier in some elections then - despite the fact that the country had the same PR electoral system then as it does now. It does show that PR doesn't stop a party being able to get majority support. In those days, it was able to benefit from the long economic boom and from the feeling that - when the oil crisis started - the SPO would ensure that the burdens flowing from the recession would be shared more fairly and that the broadest shoulders would bear the heaviest burdens. Also, perhaps, in those days there was greater class consciousness and lots of people from working-class backgrounds voted for the "worker's party" without question. Unfortunately, the party has lost more than 2/5ths of its support from that peak.
The OVP came second with 25.6%. They have lost more votes than the SPO compared to last time. Last time they were at 34.3%. Therefore, they are almost 9% down on last time whereas the SPO are about 6% down. The OVP used to be a lot more popular in the past too. When Austria was more rural and more religious, lots of small farmers and their families used to vote for them. That voting bloc is disappearing as Austria urbanises and secularises.
The two big parties have thus got only 55.3% of the votes between them. Almost half the electorate voted for parties other than the big two.
The big gainers seem to be the Freedom Party (FPO). The FPO got 18% - up from 11% last time. They came third.
Haider, the former leader of the FPO, left the FPO with some of his allies a few years ago and formed the BZO (Alliance for the Future of Austria). The BZO came 4th and so pushed the Greens into fifth place. The BZO got 11% - up from just 4.1% last time. The poor showing of the BZO last time suggested that the Haider phenomenon had run its course. This turns out not to be the case. A lot of Austrians still seem to support the chap. Last time, I suspect the BZO performance was weakened by the fact it was formed and organised so close to the elections. They hadn't had time to prepare. This time they have and so somehow seem to have persuaded more than a tenth of their fellow countrymen to vote for them.
So, the rightward drift of Austria over the last 30-40 years can be seen by the fact that 3 of the top 4 parties in terms of votes garnered are from the Right. Their combined vote share is about 54.6%.
The Greens - who did well and got 11% last time - have slipped back. They won 9.8% of votes cast. They will be the smallest party in the new parliament.
Thus, it seems likely to me that the next Austrian government will be a right-wing one. The OVP, FPO and BZO could form a coalition government. It would be likely to have 106 seats in the 183 member parliament. However, what might make such a coalition difficult to agree would be (a) reservations among the OVP on allying with the hard-right; and (b) the rivalry between the FPO and the BZO. Taking (a) first, it is clear that some in the OVP do not want to make a deal with the FPO or BZO. That is why they have been willing to form grand coalitions in the past. Looking at pt (b), the fact that the BZO emerged from an FPO split means that there is bad blood between the two. However, a government can not be formed with just 2 of the 3 parties. All three do need to be in it together in order to command a majority.
The other option would be a grand coalition - that is to say, a coalition between the SPO and the OVP. However, that is the government that Austria has just had. As such, politicians might be reluctant to return to it. Also, it could be argued that one of the reasons why the "protest" parties of the FPO and BZO are doing so well is because of disillusion with the SPO-OVP Grand Coalition.
There is, of course, the off-chance that the SPO and the Greens could deal with the FPO and BZO and form a cross-spectrum coalition. However, this is unlikely since the grassroots of the SPO and Greens would be shocked by making a deal with the hard-right.
It thus seems to me that a OVP-FPO-BZO coalition is on the cards - since I think a return to a grand coalition would be unlikely. The OVP has dealt with the FPO before - however the addition of the BZO to the mix would make it a more difficult to manage coalition government.
The Austrian political tradition doesn't seem to allow room for minority governments as much as some other countries do. If they did, then perhaps an SPO minority government (or an SPO-Green minority government) could be possible. It would require the OVP to be willing to refrain from supporting no confidence motions against such a government, though.
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