Socialist Heinz Fischer won the Austrian presidential vote on Sunday, defeating his conservative rival Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner, according to official and media projections.
Reinhold Lopatka, general secretary of Ferrero-Waldner's People's Party (OeVP) conceded defeat, congratulating Fischer for his victory in the race for the largely ceremonial post.
Fischer, who will be Austria's first socialist president in nearly two decades, had 52.3 percent of the vote to 47.7 percent for Ferrero-Waldner, ORF state television said, basing its projection on 81 percent of the votes counted.
The interior ministry had a much narrower estimate of 50.6 percent of the vote for Fischer to 49.4 percent for Ferrero-Waldner, but based on only 56 percent of the vote.
Votes yet to be counted are mostly from the capital Vienna, a left-wing bastion where Fischer is believed to have wider support than the 55-year-old foreign minister, who had been striving to become the country's first woman president.
Fischer, 65, will take office in July as the central European country's first socialist president since Rudolf Kirchschlaeger, who left office in 1986. The result of the direct ballot by Austria's six million voters could have an effect on conservative Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, who is about halfway through his term and whose party last month lost two crucial regional elections.
Fischer's win was already being proclaimed by socialist leaders as yet another sign that Schuessel's popularity is fading.
Fischer's campaign manager Norbert Darabos said the result was "a lesson for the black-blue government," referring to Schuessel's People's Party's (OeVP) coalition alliance with far-right firebrand Joerg Haider's Freedom Party (FPOe). But Lopatka said the election was "no lesson since it was relatively close and in any case was a personality contest" rather than a review of the government.
Political analyst Anton Pelinka said he did not think Ferrero-Waldner's "defeat" would be enough to "destabilize" Schuessel.
The conservative newspaper Die Presse had Saturday already all but given Fischer the win, urging him to as president abandon his left-wing rhetoric in order to be realistic about Austria's need to reduce social welfare costs in order compete in the global economy.
The president, however, has only relative political importance as he holds an honorary post, with no peacetime executive powers, though he is nominally commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the campaign was the role played by Haider, whose Freedom Party has been the junior coalition partner since 2000, staying in power after the last legislative election in 2001 for a four-year term.
The populist and xenophobic Haider does not hold a government post, as he took a step back from national politics when the European Union slapped temporary sanctions on Austria when his party joined government.
Haider came out openly for Ferrero-Waldner after Fischer attacked him for comments he made in the early 1990s saying that Hitler's policies to reduce unemployment were good.
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