By Francois Murphy
VIENNA (Reuters) -Austria’s far-right Freedom Party pledged on Sunday to take the momentum from its apparent first-ever victory in a European election into this year’s national poll after a forecast said it had won the European vote.
After polling stations in Austria closed at 5 p.m. (1500 GMT), two television channels and news agency APA published a “trend forecast” based on surveys of 3,600 people carried out this week showing the Freedom Party (FPO) came first with 27%, ahead of the ruling conservative People’s Party on 23.5%.
The actual vote count cannot be published until after the last polling stations in the European Union close at 2100 GMT, but the Austrian trend forecast proved accurate in the last European Parliament election.
“It is an electoral success that is based on let’s say critical positive reform and we now want to bring this positive reform into the parliamentary election,” the FPO’s lead candidate Harald Vilimsky told national broadcaster ORF.
“One election influences the other.”
While Austria is a relatively small country with just 20 seats in the European Parliament, the vote is to some extent a rehearsal for Austria’s parliamentary election later this year. Opinion polls show the FPO has an even larger lead in that race.
The vote must be held by October and is widely expected to take place on Sept. 29.
Voters across Europe were casting their ballots on Sunday in an election for the European Parliament that is likely to shift the assembly to the right.
The anti-immigration FPO now stops short of calling for Austria to leave the European Union but is heavily critical of the bloc, pledging to strip it of powers and halve its budget. It also opposes arms shipments to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia.
It is in the same political group as Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which projections showed as the clear winner in France. Both have capitalised on voter dissatisfaction with the government.
“I take my election result as a mandate to continue working on this Austrian model in Brussels, to bring powers back to Austria and to allow more direct democracy,” Vilimsky said.
The Austrian trend forecast showed Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s People’s Party and the opposition Social Democrats neck and neck, on 23.5% and 23.0%, followed by the Greens and liberal Neos tied on 10.5%.
The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Alexander Smith and Keith Weir)
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