BERLIN, Oct. 2 (UPI) -- Sunday's federal elections in Austria ended with an upset victory marked with the troublesome rise of far-right parties.
The Social Democrats, coming from behind, took 35.7 percent of the vote in preliminary results, narrowly beating Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's ruling conservatives, who got 34.2 percent.
Schuessel's People's Party ended up with 66 parliamentary seats, two less than the Social Democrats, spearheaded by their top candidate, Alfred Gusenbauer.
The result has surprised the country.
"Not a single newspaper commentary or a pre-election poll has foreseen such a result," Ewald Koenig, an Austrian journalist working in Berlin, Monday told United Press International in a telephone interview. "Gusenbauer is an upright person, but he can come off a bit boring and is not the media person Schuessel is."
Ahead of the elections Chancellor Schuessel had all the aces in his hands after performing well during the country's six-month rotating European Union presidency, which ended this summer.
"The EU presidency was certain to help him in the election," Koenig said.
The journalist believes the conservatives disregarded the social side and the many fears and insecurities Austrians share when it comes to job loss and globalization. The Social Democrats among other things have promised to secure pensions, cut unemployment figures by 100,000 and to increase women's wages.
The result in Austria has "alarmed" officials inside the party of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union, Koenig said.
"The result in Austria showed that you can't leave out the social aspect in a campaign," he said.
Schuessel's conservatives for the last six years have ruled the country in a controversial coalition with the far-right party Freedom Party, formed by populist Joerg Haider. His neo-Nazi ideology caused the European Union to impose sanctions on Austria that lasted half a year.
Schuessel, however, managed to push through successful reforms and turned Austria into somewhat of a European success story, with little unemployment and stable economic growth. He also kept Haider's influence quite limited -- Haider has since left the Freedom Party to form the Alliance for Austria's Future, another far-right party.
Both the Freedom Party and the Haider party campaigned with nasty anti-immigration slogans, and together, they combined for more than 15 percent of the ballot.
While the Freedom Party got 11.2 percent of the vote and is the third-strongest party in the country, the Alliance got 4.2 percent, narrowly making it into parliament.
The success for the extreme right in Austria has worried European observers. In a country with relatively low unemployment, every sixth person voting for extremist parties is a bit much, they say.
The Alliance has campaigned for immediately expelling some 300,000 foreigners from Austria, a country with little more than 8 million citizens.
Koenig said the rise of the far-right may also be due to the inability of the popular parties to tackle the immigration issue, always a hotly debated one in traditionally conservative Austria.
The conservatives and the Social Democrats "shouldn't have left the foreign infiltration issue to the far right," he told UPI. "There are ways to tackle this topic in a democratic way."
He said, however, that Austria wasn't in danger of turning into a xenophobic country.
"I think 15 percent is the upper limit," Koenig said. "The heydays of Joerg Haider, when his party got over 20 percent, are over."
So may be the extreme right's time in government: Gusenbauer, who is set to become Austria's next chancellor, has said he intends to form a coalition either with the Green Party or with Schuessel's conservatives. Such a grand coalition model has dominated Austria before 2000, but observers say the parties' different agendas are hard to combine, which may result in political deadlocks.
"A grand coalition could mean stagnancy when it comes to reforms," Koenig said.
A coalition with the Green Party would be a first in Austria's history, but "there's always a first," Koenig said, adding that the formation of such a partnership may very well happen.
Much depends on over 200,000 absentee ballots that are still to be counted. Final results have to be announced by Oct. 9. Gusenbauer has said he knows that coalition-building will be a "tough task."
