The vote to elect the president of Austria began this Sunday at 06:00 local time in Austria and will end at 17:00, when the last of the 10,000 authorized polling places close. More than 6.3 million Austrians are summoned to choose among seven candidates who will be the head of state for the next six years.
Turnout is expected to be around 65%, nine points lower than in the 2016 presidential election. Shortly after the polls close, the first run projections on actual vote count will be announced. The final result will not be known until Monday, when the vote by mail has been counted, which can account for up to 15% of the total.
The current president, the environmentalist Alexander Van der Bellen, could obtain between 51% and 58% of the votes, which would achieve an absolute majority that would avoid a second round. Van der Bellen was leader of the Greens party between 1997 and 2008, and now presents himself as an independent, with the explicit support of his former formation and also the more or less direct support of the ruling People's Party (ÖVP), the social democrats SPÖ and the liberal Neos, who do not present their own candidate.
The second candidate in voting intention is Walter Rosenkranz, from the ultra-nationalist party FPÖ, who could achieve 16%. The other five candidates could achieve support of between 9 and 1%. These are the fourteenth presidential elections since the founding of the Second Austrian Republic in 1945.
