The environmentalist and progressive Alexander Van der Bellen was re-elected as head of state of Austria by achieving an absolute majority of 56.2% in the first round of the presidential elections held this Sunday, according to the first unofficial projections with 99.1% of the vote already counted.
Van der Bellen, 78, has comfortably prevailed over the other six candidates who competed in these elections and will hold the position, which he reached in 2016, in a second and final six-year term.
The second most voted candidate was Walter Rosenkranz, of the ultranationalist FPÖ party, with 17.9% of the support. The rest of the candidates obtained between 8.4 and 1.5 of the votes.
Van der Bellen, who is running as an independent, was leader of the Greens party between 1997 and 2008, and now had the backing of his former party, the People’s Party (ÖVP), the Social Democrats of the SPÖ and the liberal Neos, who did not present their own candidate.
Van der Bellen won the 2016 election with 53.8% of the vote against the FPÖ candidate, after a long electoral process of eight months due to the challenge of the results by the ultranationalists. His first six years as president, a representative position with few executive powers, have been marked by the pandemic, several government crises, corruption cases and the situation generated by the war.
Follow us on
