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Austria's rerun of presidential election kicks off

Xinhua, December 4, 2016 Adjust font size:

Austria's rerun of presidential election kicked off on Sunday to see if the right-wing populism in Europe would ride the wave of U.S. Trump's victory.

The Greens-backed candidate Alexander Van der Bellen and the right-wing Freedom Party of Austria's Norbert Hofer are fighting for the office.

Hofer was defeated by just 31,000 votes by Van der Bellen in May's presidential run-off, but the right-wing candidate regains chance after Austria's highest court decided a rerun of the election after counting irregularities were confirmed.

The polls show that Hofer is slightly ahead of the left-wing Van der Ballen. If Hofer wins he could become Europe's first directly elected right-wing populist president of the state since the end of World War II.

European states are waiting to see if the populism wave from Donald Trump's victory in the United States could embolden the populism in Austria, which is opposed to the European Union and immigration, mostly from the Islamic world.

Neither candidate is from the Social Democrats and the center-right People's Party, the mainstream parties which have dominated the Austrian government since 1945. Endi