The Austrian Social Democratic Party caused consternation on Monday by announcing two days after the election of its new leader that it had reversed the results of the two candidates.
“Due to an employee’s technical error in the Excel table, the result has been reversed,” said the head of the SPÖ electoral commission, Michaela Grubesa, visibly embarrassed at a press conference.
Exit, therefore, Hans Peter Doskozil, 52, the representative of the centrist wing of this formation sitting in the opposition.
The unsuccessful candidate had celebrated his victory all weekend, convinced that he had won 53% of the votes of the approximately 600 congress delegates. In the tabloid Krone Zeitung on Monday, he said he was already seeing himself at the chancellery.
He immediately took note of this reversal of the situation, announcing his withdrawal from national political life. It was “not a pleasant day”, he commented in an understatement.
It is a candidate recently emerged from the shadows, Andreas Babler, 50, who finds himself against all odds at the head of the party.
In shock at this dramatic turn of events, the lucky winner preferred to ask for a new count.
This confusion announced 48 hours after the vote provoked jeers on social networks and many indignant reactions, a local party official evoking her “shame” at this “incredible amateurism”.
A commentator from public television ORF confided “never to have seen this in 30 years of business”, believing that “it was going to stick to the skin” of the SPÖ.
Especially since this blunder, discovered by pure chance, comes after years of internal quarrels within the party, which has fallen since 2017 after having provided many chancellors to Austria.
Under these conditions, he is lagging behind in the polls behind the far right, on track to win the legislative elections scheduled for the fall of 2024.
Mr. Babler “apologized for the image sent back by part of the apparatus to the militants”, promising to “put his training back on track for success”.
He is mayor of the small town of Traiskirchen (east), known for hosting the largest registration center for asylum seekers in Austria, a country often reluctant to welcome refugees.
The 50-year-old found himself in the hot seat during the campaign for a 2020 video that resurfaced. We see him qualifying the European Union as “the most aggressive foreign policy military alliance that has ever existed”.
This is not the first electoral scandal in the Alpine country of nine million inhabitants.
In 2016, irregularities during the counting of the presidential ballot had prompted the Constitutional Court to invalidate the result of the second round and the Austrians, exasperated, had to go back to the voting booth.
05/06/2023 19:23:43 – Vienna (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
