(AP Photo/Ronald Zak) (The Associated Press)
The Constitutional Court has overturned Austria’s presidential election results on Friday. Now Austria has another chance to become the first state with the far-right head in the EU.
As it is known, the former Greens leader Alexander Van der Bellen beat his opponent, Norbert Hofer of the anti-immigration and anti-EU Freedom Party (FPO), in the second round. Norbert Hofer lost to Bellen by less than one percentage point, or around 31,000 votes. The election was held on May 22.
However, Norbert Hofer filed a protest against the election at the Constitutional Court. The court found irregularities in ballot counting – counts had been carried out in the absence of party observers, because officials were racing to get a result as soon as possible. At the same time the court found no proof that the result had been manipulated.
The irregularities that have come to light during testimony to the Constitutional Court have dismayed the Austrian public, the Reuters reported.
‘There was sloppiness,’ Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka, whose ministry was accused by several witnesses of putting pressure on officials to provide a fast count of ballots, said.
As result, the court ordered a do-over of the presidential runoff. It was the first time Austria had ordered a rerun of a national election since 1945, when the Nazis were defeated.
Now a date for the re-run must be set by the centrist coalition government. According to the current President of Austria, Heinz Fischer, who will leave his post on July 8, the vote re-run will most likely be in the autumn.
21st Century Democracy – keep voting until they get it “right”…
The result were so unbelievably close that any amount of negligence could have changed the result.
Also, the difference was made by those “mail votes”. In other words, people outside Austria changing the results decided by the people in Austria.
The far-right cannot be allowed to take Europe back to the 1930s & 1940s. My grandmother was in Britain during the first second world war. This sort of toxic nationalist rationalist pseudo-populism ruined Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the rest of Europe once before. We won’t let it happen again.
its hardly far right to wish to keep Austria Austrian. The Nazi project was a result of reactionary forces inelegantly seeking to restore the traditional (and thus rightist) order of society the First World War decimated. In many ways the totalitarian Nazi state drew on the left wing Jacobin tradition that emerged from the French Revolution. So the left poison the well and then pose as the water inspector.
It’s only the paranoid left that sees fascists everywhere in their ongoing ‘Brown Scare’ melodrama.
The great thing about democracy is (a) ballots are paper bullets and (b) the internet negates the power of elites to control the narrative. So while the Antifa’s froth and rage on the streets, we’ll conduct a quiet revolution simply by walking into the voting booth.
That is funny. And what do you have to say about England conquering the world because they were Imperial, instead of Nationalist. I do believe the UK-Empire is built only on the genocide of indigenous European tribal peoples, and many other tribal peoples as well.
They’re not ‘far right’. The idea that Austria is for Austrians is moderation itself. What the left does is shift the overton window so far left the ‘new right’ becomes the old left, and thus the old right are pilloried by the new extreme left and the ersatz ‘new right’ as the extremists when the precise opposite is the case.
Consider back in the fifties Winston Churchill himself recommended conservatives that they keep Britain White. This was a mainstream idea by a man who fought the Nazis no less.
You are 100% right my friend. You have a lot of commonsense. You should be teaching Critical Thinking Classes at schools to educate the next generations.
Victory for the protection of such a nice indigenous tribal people. Anyone wishing to racially replace these tribes, is an anti-Japetic bigot.