VIENNA (AP) \u2014 Austria\u2019s liberal president was on course to win a second six-year term outright Sunday, avoiding a runoff vote after a campaign in which he portrayed himself as the stable option in uncertain times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Preliminary results gave President Alexander Van der Bellen 54.6% of the vote and his closest rival, far-right Freedom Party candidate Walter Rosenkranz, 19.1%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those figures didn\u2019t include postal ballots, which will be counted on Monday. Projections for ORF public television and the Austria Press Agency for the final result showed Van der Bellen winning around 56% of the vote, with a little under 18% for Rosenkranz.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Campaign posters for the 78-year-old Van der Bellen, who hails from the environmentalist Green party but ran as an independent, featured the slogan \u201cThe Safe Choice in Stormy Times.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Austria has faced repeated political turmoil in recent years. The Alpine country of around 9 million people went through five chancellors during Van der Bellen\u2019s first term, with government crises giving the often-largely ceremonial head of state unusually high visibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were seven contenders in Sunday\u2019s election, but Van der Bellen had the implicit or explicit backing of Austria\u2019s mainstream parties. The Freedom Party was the only party in parliament to field a candidate against him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Van der Bellen said that, with pre-election polls giving him a big lead, he had worried that people wouldn\u2019t turn out to vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe have never had seven candidates in a presidential election before, and I don\u2019t think we have ever \u2014 at least I can\u2019t think of an example \u2014 had such an environment in which people are unsettled, where discontent with politics is high and you don\u2019t know what direction that will go in,\u201d he told ORF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The president said Austria faces \u201cvery uneasy times,\u201d with worries about the war in Ukraine, energy supplies and prices and a potential resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI hope there will be a kind of closing of ranks of the constructive forces in this republic so that we can tackle these problems together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2016, Van der Bellen beat a more prominent Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer, by about 53.8% to 46.2% in a runoff that was rerun on the orders of Austria\u2019s Constitutional Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hofer\u2019s party had claimed widespread voting irregularities in the initial runoff months earlier that Van der Bellen won by a whisker. The vote was closely watched in a year that produced the Brexit vote in the U.K. and Donald Trump\u2019s election in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was no sign of any such drama this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Freedom Party, which was the junior partner in a coalition government that collapsed in a scandal surrounding its then-leader in 2019, had capitalized on inflation and rising energy prices to make modest poll gains in recent months. But Rosenkranz, a lawyer and the former leader of its parliamentary group, didn\u2019t pose the strong challenge that Hofer did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The remaining five candidates \u2014 all of whom were seen polling under 10% \u2014 included other contenders on the hard right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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