Far right left out

last updated 8 January 2015

Vienna

The winner of Austria’s parliamentary elections said this week he wouldn’t include far-right parties in his governing coalition. Alfred Gusenbauer, whose Social Democrats took 36 percent of the vote to beat the center-right ruling People’s Party’s 34 percent, said he would consider a unity coalition with the People’s Party or a minority coalition with the Greens. Two far-right parties, the Freedom Party and its offshoot, the Alliance for the Future of Austria, captured 15 percent between them by campaigning on anti-immigrant themes. That’s a bigger share of the vote than the extreme right gets in most European countries, but still a big drop from the 27 percent it got in Austria in 1999.