Austria's Norbert Hofer won Friday another shot at becoming the European Union's first far-right anti-immigration president after his nation's highest court dramatically annulled his narrow election defeat from May. The Constitutional Court found no evidence of election fraud, but ruled that procedural irregularities were sufficiently widespread for the May 22 runoff - which saw Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPOe) lose by just 30,863 votes - to be held again.
"The decision I am announcing today has no winner and no loser, it has only one aim: to strengthen trust in the rule of law and democracy," the court's president Gerhart Holzinger said in an announcement live on national television. "I am happy that the court has taken a difficult decision," Hofer said. Alexander Van der Bellen, the independent ecologist who won the election, said he was "very confident" he would triumph again.
Gun enthusiast Hofer came top in a first round of voting in April and preliminary results on the evening of the May 22 runoff against Van der Bellen, 72, put the 45-year-old narrowly ahead. But after some 700,000 postal votes were counted, the Greens-backed Van der Bellen was declared the winner of the largely ceremonial post the next day, sparking relief among centrist parties in Austria and across Europe.
The FPOe, which is topping opinion polls ahead of the next scheduled general election in 2018 as it stokes concerns about immigration, launched a legal challenge on June 8 alleging "terrifying" irregularities. After dozens of witnesses detailed what Interior Minister Wolfgang Sobotka called widespread "sloppiness", the court found that postal votes in 14 areas - or 78,000 votes - were opened too early or by unauthorised persons, and so could have been doctored.
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