VIENNA — Alexander Van der Bellen, a 72-year-old economics professor and former Green Party leader, won Austria’s cliffhanger presidential election on Monday, defeating his far-right rival by the slimmest of margins and pledging to unite his divided country.
Austria had to wait almost 24 hours after polls closed on Sunday for the authorities to count almost 700,000 valid mail-in ballots. In the end, Van der Bellen won 50.3 percent of the vote, and his far-right rival, Norbert Hofer, 49.7 percent, a difference of just over 30,000 votes, the Interior Ministry said.
Hofer conceded defeat on his Facebook page, writing: “Of course I am sad today. I would so gladly have taken care of our wonderful country for you as president.’’ He added, “The effort for this campaign is not lost, but an investment in the future.’’
The result averted the prospect of the first right-wing populist head of state in post-Nazi Europe taking office in a democratic election.
But the close result illustrated how deeply divided Austria is between left and right, and how thoroughly the centrist elites who have run the country since 1945 have fallen from public grace.
The narrowness of the victory also reflected the big strides into the mainstream the far right has made not only in Austria, but in much of Europe — from neighboring Hungary and Poland, where it already holds sway, to France and Germany, where rightist movements are polling strongly ahead of national elections next year.
In Britain, voters are scheduled to decide next month whether their country will stay in the European Union. That vote could turn on issues like migrants and a rejection of European unity and the continent’s centrist elites — issues that also played significantly into Austria’s vote.
In his first speech as president-elect, Van der Bellen emphasized his pro-European stance, welcoming foreign reporters in English, and promised Hofer’s voters that their grievances and views would be heard.
“We have quite clearly got a lot of work to do,’’ Van der Bellen said. “Obviously, people do not feel sufficiently seen or heard, or both,’’ even if the five-month campaign proved that Austrians were ready to discuss politics at length — something their new president said was “a good sign.’’
Polling experts said Van der Bellen won the election on support from city dwellers — particularly in Vienna, which voted 61 percent for him — women and the highly educated. He promised Sunday night that he would try to heal the rifts that had opened up along these and other lines as establishment politics stagnated.
Hofer’s showing is the first time the Freedom Party, which has its roots in the 1950s, when it was founded by former Nazis and Teutonic nationalists, has gained close to 50 percent of the popular vote.
That alone signals that it is a factor to be reckoned with as Austria, a generally prosperous country of 8.4 million, grapples to find its place in a globalized world, and in a Europe whose unity is under question.
The disruptions of globalization and last year’s wave of 1 million migrants — most of whom only passed through Austria en route to Germany or Sweden — were central themes of the election.
Despite Austria’s outward prosperity, wrote Rainer Nowak, editor of Die Presse, the leading center-right daily, “people fear that it won’t go so well for much longer.’’ Besides, he added, “we have indeed become a somewhat saturated society, which suppresses or simply overlooks the real problems, and is unwilling to accept the slightest sacrifice when it comes to reforms or changes.’’
The parties of the center-left and center-right that governed for most of the past 30 years in ever-duller grand coalitions were trounced in the first round of the presidential elections last month, when Hofer stunned rivals by reaping 35.1 percent, well ahead of Van der Bellen with 21 percent.
Sunday’s runoff turned into a cliffhanger as the vote was counted and showed an ever-narrowing lead for Hofer. The Austrian public service broadcaster ORF projected that Van der Bellen would win by just 3,000 votes when the mail-in ballots were counted Monday.
That projection — and the tone of some of the ORF reporting on the election — was heavily criticized by the Freedom Party. It was not clear if there would be legal consequences, but the party’s attitude illustrated the country’s deep divisions.
Doron Rabinovici, a writer who was among several prominent intellectuals supporting Van der Bellen, noted that “the 50-50 vote is not in itself a split; that’s democracy.’’ But how one proceeds is what matters.
“We do have a problem in this country, that politics has been conducted not in discussing substance but at the level of the tabloid press,’’ he said.
In Rabinovici’s view, that was particularly true of the last chancellor, Social Democrat Werner Faymann, who resigned on May 9 after the rightward lurch in the first round of the presidential vote.
Faymann had, at first, supported the welcoming stance of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to the hundreds of thousands of refugees who poured in from the Balkans last year.
