London: Austria’s far-right party has won a historic first national election after tapping into voters’ fears of immigration and the Ukraine war, exit polls predict.

The result will consolidate pro-Russian, anti-establishment forces in central Europe. Preliminary official results put support for the Freedom Party at 29.2 per cent and for Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s Austrian People’s Party at 26.5 per cent. The centre-left Social Democrats were in third place with 21 per cent.

Herbert Kickl, a former interior minister and long-time campaign strategist who has led the Freedom Party since 2021, has promised voters he will build “Fortress Austria” to restore their security, prosperity and peace. It’s Austria’s first far-right national election win post-World War II.

One of Europe’s longest-standing parties of the populist right, The Freedom Party has embraced increasingly hardline and extremist policies on immigration and has never come first in a national election before. It was founded in the 1950s by former members of the SS and other Nazi veterans.

Kickl campaigned on an end to sanctions against Russia, was critical of Western military aid to Ukraine and wants to opt out of the European Sky Shield Initiative, a missile defence project launched by Germany.

He has used the term “Volkskanzler”, or chancellor of the people, which was used by the Nazis to describe Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Kickl has rejected the comparison.

In its election platform, the party called for “remigration of uninvited foreigners” and for achieving a more “homogeneous” nation by tightly controlling borders and suspending the right to asylum via an “emergency law”.

But to become the country’s new leader, Kickl will now need a coalition partner to command a majority in the lower house of parliament. He said he’d start negotiations straight away. His party was on course to secure about 57 seats in the 183-seat parliament, with the conservatives on 51 and the Social Democrats on 40.