Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Austria's Botched Vote Feeds Populist Distrust

A court ruling annulling the presidential election provides ammunition to the idea that the system is rigged.

July 1, 2016 at 6:54 PM UTC

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Not so fast.
Photographer: Roland Sclager/AFP/Getty Images

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Austria is such an uneventful and reliable democracy that the election-monitoring arm of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe decided against observing its latest presidential election. Yet, on Friday, the country's Constitutional Court threw out the result of a May 22 runoff and required a re-vote because of technical irregularities in the vote-counting process.

The Austrian president is not a powerful figure, but the election was highly contentious because of the strong performance of Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party, who almost became the first far-right head of state elected in Europe since World War II. Hofer led in the polls but a Green Party-backed candidate, Alexander Van der Bellen, ended up winning by just 30,863 votes, thanks to strong support from absentee voters who mailed in their ballots.