Sober balance – tailwind for new parties after Hofburg election?

A look at the past shows that a respectable success in the Hofburg elections does not mean that you will also be successful in a National Council election. For example, the candidate Richard Lugner, known as the Socialite, achieved 9.91 percent in 1998, a respectable result for a candidate who had no party apparatus behind him.

Lugner failed flat
However, circumstances at the time were quite favorable: when Thomas Klestil ran for re-election, the SPÖ, FPÖ and Greens decided not to nominate their own candidates. Inspired by this, Lugner tried in the 1999 National Council election. His party “The Independents” failed by just 1.02 percent; instead of the 413,066 votes in the presidential election, there were only 46,943 NR voters. A second attempt at the Hofburg also went wrong: in 2016 Lugner found only 96,783 voters, that was 2.26 percent.

The Liberales Forum also failed to benefit from electoral success
The 1998 example of Heide Schmidt and her Liberal Forum showed that personality elections and parliamentary elections are two different things: Schmidt won more than 464,625 voters as a presidential candidate and received 11.14 percent. There had never been so much for Liberales Forum. Just a year after the federal presidential election in 1999, the LIF was kicked out of the National Council by just 168,612 votes (3.65 percent).

Christians didn’t even get autographs
Even before his candidacy for the Hofburg, Rudolf Gehring had tried in vain to get his “Christian” party into the National Council or into the state parliaments. He never found even one percent approval for this. But in the 2010 presidential election, he personally found 171,668 voters (5.43 percent). Gehring’s hopes that things would improve for his party were thwarted: in the three National Council elections that followed, the CPÖ did not even get the signatures for the national candidacy.

Are candidates now in love with Parliament?
The conclusion of ex-FPÖ/BZÖ politician Gerald Grosz that with the 5.57 percent he received on Sunday he would have immediately entered the National Council is only theoretically correct. Tassilo Wallentin’s assumption that his current performance (327,214 votes or 8.07 percent) would be a “dominant victory” if applied to a National Council election could be disappointed if he tries to carry it out. Because in the elections to the House of Representatives, the established parties put a lot of money and effort into the election campaign.

Wlazny with the momentum of young voters
Dominik Wlazny – third in the presidential election with 337,010 and 8.31 percent – has already made his first attempts in the parliamentary elections. And they delivered much more modest results than the current personality election – so the question remains how he could take the momentum of the many young voters (here he was particularly successful) into a possible National Council election campaign.

He appeared there in 2019 with his beer party, but only managed to hold his own in Vienna and had to settle for 4946 votes or 0.10 percent. Even in the 2020 elections in Vienna, about 13,100 votes were not enough to enter the state parliament; but the beer party has at least made it to a number of district councils – including the one in Simmering, where Wlazny is a district councilor.

Missing structures as a brake
Wlazny or other Hofburg candidates could make the next bid to capture the National Council in 2024 – if the regular election date is observed. In any case, the beer party is already trying to recruit members in order to be able to build the necessary party structures for such a case. According to the party leader, the lack of this makes it unlikely that he will participate in the state elections in Lower Austria.