Turnout: 65.19%
About this election
The Austrian presidential election of 9 October 2022 returned the incumbent Alexander Van der Bellen to office for a second term, comfortably and in a single round, with 56.69% of the vote. After the drama of 2016, the contest was a far calmer affair, confirming Van der Bellen's broad cross-party standing while underlining the fragmentation of the challenger field.
The Austrian President is directly elected for a six-year term by a two-round majority system; a candidate winning more than half the valid votes in the first round is elected outright. The office is largely ceremonial but holds real reserve powers over the appointment and dismissal of governments — powers Van der Bellen had exercised prominently during the turbulence that followed the 2019 Ibiza affair. The 2022 election was the first test of his standing since those events and since the resignation of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
Van der Bellen ran as a unifying, above-party incumbent, emphasising stability amid the energy crisis and inflation that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Unusually, he faced six challengers but no candidate from the ÖVP or SPÖ, both of which effectively stood aside. The FPÖ nominated Walter Rosenkranz, while a crowded field of right-wing and protest candidates — including the satirist and Beer Party founder Dominik Wlazny ("Marco Pogo"), the columnist Tassilo Wallentin and the pundit Gerald Grosz — split the opposition vote.
Van der Bellen won 56.69% and was re-elected without a run-off. The FPÖ's Walter Rosenkranz finished a distant second on 17.68%, followed by Dominik Wlazny on 8.31% and Tassilo Wallentin on 8.07%, with Gerald Grosz, Michael Brunner of the anti-vaccination MFG and the entrepreneur Heinrich Staudinger trailing. Turnout was 65.19%. Van der Bellen finished first in all nine states and, indeed, in every one of Austria's administrative districts.
Van der Bellen's second term began as Austria grappled with inflation, the war in Ukraine and a resurgent far right. His role became pivotal again after the September 2024 legislative election, in which the FPÖ finished first: as president, he managed the protracted coalition negotiations and ultimately oversaw the formation of a three-party government that excluded the FPÖ despite its victory — a striking exercise of the presidency's constitutional influence.
Van der Bellen's first-round victory looks less surprising in historical context: in the Second Republic no sitting Austrian president who stood again has ever been defeated, and re-elections have typically been won outright in round one — Heinz Fischer managed it with an even larger share in 2010, as had Thomas Klestil in 1998. Austrian voters treat the presidency as an office above party competition, and challengers to an incumbent start far behind. The 2022 result confirmed the rule even in a fragmented, seven-candidate field.
Just as telling was who did not stand. Neither the ÖVP nor the SPÖ — the two parties that between them held the presidency for its entire post-war history until 2016 — fielded a candidate, both effectively conceding the race to the incumbent they preferred over any alternative. The challenger field, all men, split the protest vote several ways: the FPÖ's Walter Rosenkranz finished a distant second, with the satirist-turned-politician Dominik Wlazny (of the Beer Party) and the columnist Tassilo Wallentin dividing much of the rest. That fragmentation, visible in the vote shares above, is itself a snapshot of how loose the old two-party grip on Austrian institutions has become.
The contrast with the previous presidential contest could hardly be sharper. In 2016 Van der Bellen needed two rounds, saw the run-off annulled by the Constitutional Court over procedural flaws in postal voting, and won only at a re-run seven months after the first ballot — the longest presidential election in Austrian history. In 2022 the same candidate settled matters in an afternoon. The calm was partly his record in office, and partly that the disruptive energy of 2016 had moved on: the FPÖ was still rebuilding after the 2019 Ibiza affair, and no challenger could assemble a broad coalition against him.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.