VIENNA – A lawmaker from the far-right Freedom Party was elected Thursday as the new speaker of Austria's parliament, weeks after the party won a national election for the first time.
Walter Rosenkranz becomes the first member of the Freedom Party to be elected as speaker, one of the country's highest-ranking positions in protocol terms. It has traditionally been taken by the strongest party.
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Rosenkranz, a lawyer and former leader of his party's parliamentary group who most recently served as a member of the Austrian Ombudsman Board, won the support of 100 of the 183 lawmakers in the new parliament's inaugural session. No other party fielded a candidate but dozens of votes went to other lawmakers.
While a majority of lawmakers stuck to tradition in making the 62-year-old Rosenkranz speaker, the Freedom Party isn't likely to be part of the next government.
On Tuesday, President Alexander Van der Bellen dispensed with a tradition of giving the first-placed party's leader the task of forming a new administration after the Sept. 29 parliamentary election produced a stalemate. Instead, he asked incumbent Chancellor Karl Nehammer to do so.
Whoever leads the next government will need to build a coalition to have a parliamentary majority.
But Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party has said it wouldn’t work with the Freedom Party under its leader, Herbert Kickl. The other three parties in the new parliament said they wouldn’t work with the Freedom Party at all. And Kickl said the Freedom Party would only go into government with him as chancellor.
Nehammer says he will try to form a three-party coalition with the center-left Social Democrats and one of two smaller parties, the liberal Neos or the environmentalist Greens.
Rosenkranz was the Freedom Party's candidate in the 2022 presidential election, finishing a distant second behind Van der Bellen.