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July 1, 2016
Austria’s Highest Court Orders Repeat of Presidential Runoff
BERLIN —
Austria’s highest court threw out the results of the nation’s presidential election on Friday, giving a far right, euroskeptic party a second chance to win. The ruling put the European Union’s core issues back in the cross hairs of voters only a week after Britain’s decision to
quit.
Citing irregularities in ballot counting, Austria’s highest court ordered a do-over of the country’s presidential runoff, which an anti-immigrant candidate, Norbert Hofer, narrowly lost in May. It was the first time the country ordered a rerun of a national election since 1945, when the Nazis were defeated.
Now, Mr. Hofer has the chance to become the first far-right politician elected head of state in Europe since
World War II. Much like the British vote last week, the new election in
Austria could well serve as a referendum on the central tenets, roles and responsibilities of the European Union.
The aftershocks of the British referendum on leaving the 28-nation bloc did not stop there. Central and Eastern European nations demanded on Friday that the European Union do a better job of dealing with migration.
The prime minister of Slovakia, which assumed the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union on Friday, warned that the bloc’s leaders needed to pay more attention to national sovereignty. The prime minister, Robert Fico, urged “a balance, an equilibrium, between the member states and the European institutions,” so that “neither should dominate.”
The leaders of the European Union are trying to discourage other states from leaving by making Britain’s exit as painful as possible. Still, the growing pressure from angry electorates across Europe may force them to rapidly address the issues that drove more than 17 million Britons to vote to leave: sovereignty, borders and migrants.
The view that power “needs to be rebalanced toward capitals is absolutely on the table in light of the U.K.’s decision to leave the bloc,” said Mujtaba Rahman, the Europe director for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.
He added, “There’s a tremendous desire from all over Europe to win back autonomy and sovereignty from Brussels that is motivated by how out of touch the E.U. has become with the everyday fears and concerns of its citizens.”
In the Austrian election, the European Union “could very well become a theme in the coming campaign,” said Hans Rauscher, a columnist for the liberal Austrian newspaper
Der Standard.
The two candidates’ stances on Europe could not be more different: Mr. Hofer, a 45-year-old nationalist who has advocated for the rights of disabled people since he was injured in a paragliding accident, and Alexander Van der Bellen, a 72-year-old former leader of the Green party who supports a border-free “United States of Europe.”
Elected to Parliament in 2006, Mr. Hofer has galvanized voters disillusioned with the two mainstream parties that have governed Austria continually — and often in coalition — since the 1950s.
When polls closed in the May 22 runoff round of the election, Mr. Hofer was leading, but a final count that included about 700,000 postal ballots put Mr. Van der Bellen
ahead by roughly 31,000 votes. The leader of Mr. Hofer’s anti-immigration Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court about irregularities in 94 of 117 electoral districts.
The chairman of the Constitutional Court, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that “the runoff must be repeated in all of Austria,” and said the decision was guided solely by the court’s mission to protect the rule of law and democracy. The judges described procedural mistakes regarding the timing and monitoring of the counting of some ballots.
Along with promising to hold Austria’s government more accountable, Mr. Hofer and his party campaigned heavily on the migrant issue. Most of the more than
one million migrants who reached Germany last year did so on land routes that took them through Austria. More than 90,000 migrants decided to apply for asylum in Austria — a similar number as in Germany, which has 10 times Austria’s population.
Britain’s June 23 referendum — in which immigration was a central issue — was the first time a country had decided to quit the European Union, and it bolstered euroskeptic parties across the Continent, including in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.
After the British referendum, Mr. Hofer said he favored holding a similar referendum in Austria if Brussels failed to halt new efforts at centralizing power in Brussels. On Sunday, he told the newspaper Österreich that if the European Union “evolves in the wrong direction, then for me the time would have come to say: So, now we have to ask the Austrians.”
In 1994, 67 percent of Austrians voted in a referendum to join the European Union, and recent polls suggest that a clear majority supports continued membership, said Mr. Rauscher, the newspaper columnist.
Any new referendum would have to be approved by Parliament, but the Freedom Party could initiate a grass-roots appeal for a referendum like the one in Britain. “Parliament could ignore that,” Mr. Rauscher wrote in an email, “but that would be a good propaganda tool for the Freedom Party.”
The decision by British voters to leave the European Union was strongly influenced by immigration from other European countries, but Britain, which is not part of the
Schengen visa-free zone, has not felt the crush of Middle Eastern and North African refugees in the same way that other European nations have. Slovakia, and other smaller countries, has objected to the quota plan devised by European leaders. Germany has insisted that all members of the bloc must do their share to solve what is a common problem.
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/world/europe/austria-president-runoff.html?_r=0
