Austria moving to the right as it's set to elect Europe's youngest leader - latimes

Austria was set to elect a new conservative leader on Sunday who triumphed by promising to take a hard line on the tens of thousands of refugees who have poured into the country from Syria.

Sebastian Kurz, 31, who would become the European Union’s youngest leader, is expected to attempt to form a coalition with a far-right populist party that was long ostracized for its extreme nationalism.

Kurz was leading the conservative People’s Party into first place in Sunday’s parliamentary election with 31.9% of the vote, according to Austrian TV projections. That was an increase of 7.9 percentage points from the last election and put Kurz, who has been serving as foreign minister, on track to become the Alpine Republic’s 12th post-war chancellor.

The country’s sharp tilt to the right after a bitter election campaign centered on migrants and taxes, reflecting both rising tensions towards a growing number of immigrants in the Alpine republic as well as growing support for far-right populists crusading to preserve national identities across Europe.

A wealthy country of 8.7 million people lodged between Germany and Italy, Switzerland and Slovakia, Austria served as a gateway into Germany for more than a million refugees fleeing Syria and other troubled spots over the last two years.

Austria itself took in about 100,000 refugees, equal to more than 1% of its population, before Kurz as foreign minister sensed public apprehension and designed a plan to shut its borders and effectively stop the stream of refugees moving north.

Kurz forced the snap election when he refused to continue in a coalition as junior partners to the Social Democrats and quickly attracted voters by vowing to shut down the flow of migrants to Austria and limit benefit payments to refugees.

Now, Kurz’s People’s Party and the Freedom Party would have enough support to form a hard-right coalition that would replace the left-center grand coalition that has ruled Austria for the last decade and that until now has been led by Chancellor Christian Kern, head of the ruling Social Democrats. - Read More

Austria moving to the right as it's set to elect Europe's youngest leader

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