Oskar Deutsch, head of Vienna's Jewish community, expressed relief today at the outcome of Austria's presidential election, in which independent candidate Alexander Van der Bellen narrowly won over far-right candidate Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party.
Deutsch described Mr Van Der Bellen - former spokesperson for Austria's Green Party - as "a good friend for many years to the Jewish community and a very good friend to the state of Israel." He said Van Der Bellen had been one of the few politicians to personally demonstrate at a pro-Israel rally during recent troubles.
"I am very happy that on the one hand he won, and on the other hand I am very happy that the other candidate did not win," Mr Deutsch said. "There are a lot of people in [Hofer's] party who were and are very near to antisemitism and are often using antisemitic [expressions.] All's well that ends well."
Sunday's election brought the two candidates to a tie, which was broken today with the counting of nearly 500,000 absentee ballots. By late afternoon, Mr Van der Bellen had an extremely narrow but clear advantage of 12,000 votes. Austrian Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka announced the results in the late afternoon.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, about 71.8 per cent of Austria's 6.4 million eligible voters came to the polls on Sunday.
The presidential post is largely symbolic, but the President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, characterised the vote as a warning to all Europeans against taking the divisive path of populism, according to Der Spiegel.
What worries Mr Deutsch is the tendency of right-populist parties across Europe to join forces. "They are working closely together, just like all the Socialist parties in Europe do," he said. "That is worrying enough."
In fact, the head of Germany's upstart right-populist party, Alternative For Germany, Frauke Petry, "was here yesterday at the FPO party, celebrating with them. She was a bit too early," Mr Deutsch quipped.
Austria's official Jewish community numbers some 8,000 members, but there may be nearly twice that number unofficially. About 2,000 Jews in Austria come from the former Soviet bloc states of Uzbekistan and Georgia.
Pundits viewed the vote as a rejection of the two centrist parties that have governed Austria for more than 70 years. Neither the Social Democrats nor the People’s party had earned enough votes in April's pre-election to take part in the May 22 run-off for the presidential post.
