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| Norbert Hofer (right) lost out to Alexander Van der Bellen (left) in a knife-edge election, with a majority of only 30,863 votes Photograph: Hans Punz/AFP/Getty Images |
Austria’s constitutional court has annulled the result of the country’s presidential election, which saw a narrow defeat in May for rightwing populist Norbert Hofer.
The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the
run-off vote between Hofer of the Freedom party and Green-backed
Alexander Van der Bellen would have to be repeated across the whole
country after an investigation had revealed irregularities in the count
of the vote in several constituencies.
The ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office.
Hofer had lost out to Van der Bellen in a knife-edge election on 22 May, with a majority of only 30,863 votes.
While the Austrian presidency is a largely ceremonial role, the
outcome has been seen as hugely symbolic, with the Freedom party
seemingly buoyed by growing anti-refugee sentiments and disaffection
with the country’s political establishment.
The Freedom party had contested the outcome of the vote after
claiming to have detected formal irregularities in 94 out of 117
constituencies, submitting a 150-page formal complaint to the
constitutional court.
Over the course of the investigation, it had emerged that several
counting centres had begun to process postal votes on the eve of the
election, rather than on the day after the election, as Austrian
electoral law requires.
Witness statements in court also revealed that election scrutineers
in some centres had signed minutes of the vote count without having read
them.
While the court emphasised that there was no evidence of the outcome
of the election having been actively manipulated, the confirmed
irregularities had affected a total of 77,926 votes that could have gone
to either Hofer or Van der Bellen – enough, in theory, to change the
outcome of the election.
Van der Bellen, a retired economics professor and former leader of
Austria’s Green party, was due to be sworn in as president in a week’s
time, on Friday 8 July.
Constitutional court president Holzinger said that the ruling “did
not turn anyone into a winner or a loser”, but that elections were the
“fundamental basis of our democracy” and therefore had to be “fully
functional”.
“Even in a stable democracy only the total adherence to electoral
standards secures the citizens’ trust in our democracy”, Holzinger said.
The ruling is unprecedented in Austria.
In 1970 and 1995, the country’s constitutional court had ordered
re-elections in individual councils, but not in the entire country.
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