After a campaign dominated by Europe’s biggest refugee crisis in decades, the far-right Freedom party achieved a record result in a city election in Vienna on Sunday, but failed by a clear margin to beat the Social Democrats.
The election had increasingly become a personal contest between the mayor of 20 years, Michael Häupl, and the head of the Freedom party, Heinz-Christian Strache, who has repeatedly called for Austria to build a border fence to keep migrants out.
Although Strache’s party improved on its best performance in Vienna, which was achieved under his charismatic predecessor Jörg Haider in 1996, it was beaten far more soundly than polls before the vote had predicted.
Tens of thousands of refugees have passed through Vienna in the past month, almost all continuing to Germany. Their sudden arrival prompted an outpouring of sympathy, with many Viennese people donating food and clothes.
But fears about rising immigration have long fuelled support for the far right in Austria, which proportionally had one of the highest rates of asylum seekers of any European Union country even before the latest arrivals.
“No one will be able to belittle our success today,” Strache told the broadcaster ORF.
The Social Democratic party, which has governed “Red Vienna” ever since much of it lay in ruins after the second world war, secured 39.5% of Sunday’s vote, ahead of the Freedom party on 31%, a projection produced for ORF indicated.
The Freedom party’s share of the vote has risen significantly both in Vienna and nationally in the past decade to more than 20%, while the Social Democrats and the centre-right People’s party have lost ground in elections.
Sunday’s vote was the worst performance for the Social Democrats in Vienna since the second world war, but also a repudiation of its national coalition with the People’s party which has been in place under Chancellor Werner Faymann since 2008.
The Guardian