In the Austrian parliamentary elections, the farmer-friendly ruling party ÖVP suffered a heavy defeat, but is still the largest party in many rural areas. The election results reflect the gulf between Austria's urban and rural areas.
The outcome bears many similarities to recent elections in the Netherlands, France and eastern Germany, where far-right anti-immigrant parties emerged as the largest voters.
The pro-Russian FPÖ party doubled its voter support to 29 percent (compared to five years ago), while the ÖVP lost a quarter of its support, ending up at 26.3 percent. In the rural areas, the ÖVP remained one percent larger than Herbert Kickl's anti-EU party.
The social democratic opposition party SPÖ did not get further than just over 20 percent, while the support for the Greens almost halved to just over 8 percent, while the liberal NEOS remained stuck at around 10 percent.
Conservative Chancellor Karl Nehammer (ÖVP) has called on President von der Bellen (Greens) to now instruct the far-right Freedom Party to form a coalition. All Austrian parties have said they absolutely do not want controversial party leader Kickl to become chancellor.
Whether such a rejection applies only to the person Kickl, or to the entire FPÖ, remains to be seen. Some ÖVP leaders have hinted that a coalition under another FPÖ leader is possible. In that case, a comparison with the situation in the Netherlands is inevitable, where the largest party was able to form a coalition, but the controversial party leader Geert Wilders was not allowed to become prime minister.
With regional elections later this month and next month in two Austrian provinces governed by an ÖVP coalition, some within the party are wary of pushing the FPÖ aside too quickly, for fear of losing ground again. In theory, it is also possible that the FPÖ will form the largest faction, but that after a failed attempt to form a coalition, a three-party coalition of ÖVP and SPÖ will still take office, together with the smaller liberals or the Greens.
For the Austrian agricultural sector, it is to be expected that with this 'shift to the right' a stronger anti-European policy will be developed in any case. In this respect, the question will be - as in the Netherlands - to what extent Austria can withdraw from the detailed frameworks and guidelines of the European agricultural and climate policy. Usually, the soup is not eaten as hot, and usually years of procedures precede it.