VIENNA (Reuters) – The far-right Austrian Freedom Party’s lead over its nearest rival has shrunk to within the margin of error, two recent opinion polls showed, the most recent of which was published on Thursday, 10 days before Austria’s parliamentary election.
Extreme rain last weekend caused severe flooding in parts of Lower Austria, the province that surrounds Vienna. It forced the cancellation of campaign events while conservative Chancellor Karl Nehammer has remained in the public eye, chairing emergency response meetings and visiting flooded areas.
The two surveys, carried out after the worst of the flooding, showed Nehammer’s People’s Party (OVP) closing the gap with the anti-Islam Freedom Party (FPO), which has led in opinion polls for more than a year.
A survey by pollster Market for newspaper Der Standard published on Thursday showed 27% of respondents said they backed the FPO and 25% the OVP, with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points. The opposition Social Democrats (SPO) were third with 20%.
The survey of 828 people was carried out from Monday to Wednesday and was a combination of online and in-person interviews, a method pollsters say is more reliable than solely online surveys since older voters tend to use the internet less.
The last time that poll was carried out, in July, the FPO was also at 27% but it had a five-point lead over both the OVP and the SPO.
A separate survey by pollster OGM for Servus TV published on Wednesday showed the FPO at 26%, just ahead of the OVP at 25% and the SPO with 21%.
That online survey of 1,022 people also had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points and was carried out between Monday and Wednesday. The online interviews in both polls were conducted with people who were initially recruited offline.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy in Vienna; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
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