2019 Austrian Legislative Election Sunday Sep 29,2019

Former Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's People's Party (ÖVP) won a clear victory in the snap election held on sunday Sep 29,2019

Kurz's party scored 37.1 percent in Sunday's vote — an increase of 5.7 percentage points compared with the 2017 poll.

The far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) suffered a worse-than-expected loss, down almost 10 percentage points to around 16%, a sign that the party's reputation may have suffered after a corruption scandal earlier this year.

The center-left Social Democrats (SPÖ) plunged five percentage points to around 22%, the party's worst results since World War II.

The Greens gained 10.2 points to reach 14%, raising the prospect of a coalition between the ÖVP and the Greens.

The election is necessiated by the collapse in May'19 of Kurz's coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) after a video sting operation that forced Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache of the FPO to step down.

Kurz, 33, has emerged largely unscathed from the scandal, even gaining voters from the FPO whose support has slipped to roughly one-fifth of the electorate from just over one-quarter in the last vote in 2017

About 6.4 million Austrians aged 16 and older were eligible to vote. The turnout was 75.5 percent.
What happens next?

The People's Party triumphed in eight of Austria's nine federal states, losing only Vienna to the Social Democrats.

Despite the People's Party's strong showing, it will not have a majority in parliament and Mr Kurz will need coalition partners.

The 33-year-old could choose to renew his alliance with the Freedom Party - the source of the scandal - but may want to look at other options.

A three-way pact with the Greens (which received 12.4% of the vote) and the liberal pro-business Neos party (7.4%) is considered far more likely than a grand coalition with the Social Democrats (21.5%).

Who is Sebastian Kurz?

The son of a secretary and a teacher, he became active in the People's Party at the age of 16.

As a law student in Vienna he was elected chairman of the party's youth wing. He quit his studies in 2011 to become a junior interior minister, rising to foreign minister in 2013 at the age of 27.

Two years later he presented a plan to improve the integration of immigrants. However, he was also full of praise for Hungary's populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and claimed credit for closing the Balkan migrant route in 2016.

Elected chairman in May 2017, he rebranded the party as the Turquoise Movement then served as chancellor from December 2017 to May 2019, when the Ibiza-gate brought down the coalition.