Who is Alexander Van der Bellen, Austria's new president
Rights — di Andrea Barolini
A portrait of Alexander Van der Bellen: 72 years old, two children, two marriages, and a life spent teaching. For eleven years he led the Greens.
Who is Alexander Van der Bellen, Austria's new president
A portrait of Alexander Van der Bellen: 72 years old, two children, two marriages, and a life spent teaching. For eleven years he led the Greens.
For Alexander Van der Bellen, Sunday 22 May has the taste of revenge. In 2008, the Green MP had stood for the vice-presidency of the National Assembly, Austria's parliament, with the aim of acting as a "shield" against the rise of the FPÖ, the far-right, anti-European and anti-immigration party.
At the time, however, Martin Graf — a man who came from the very heart of Austria's nationalist milieu — was preferred over Van der Bellen. Eight years were needed, but this time it is the 72-year-old environmentalist who has defeated an FPÖ rival, albeit with only 50.3 per cent of the vote, after a fiercely contested race against Norbert Hofer.
Retired professor of economics
Van der Bellen is a former university professor of economics and former dean of the Faculty of Economic Sciences in Vienna, now retired. His vision of politics, of Austria and of the world at large is the polar opposite of that of the far-right candidate against whom he has duelled. Against the closing of borders, he has set the idea of an open, multicultural society, claiming that he too is a "son of refugees." His father was a Russian aristocrat who, together with his mother, an Estonian, arrived in Austria fleeing the 1917 revolution.
The new president grew up in the state of Tyrol, a few kilometres from the border with Italy. In that same land, he raised his two children before entering politics, first in the ranks of the Social Democrats and then of the Greens, of which he was president for no fewer than eleven years. A convinced European, he has made his own several of the principal causes of the European ecological movement — as in the case of the transatlantic free trade agreement, the so-called TTIP, which he has promised not to sign.
Recently remarried to a Green MP
Austere and refined in his manner, for his FPÖ opponents he is a "left-winger in bourgeois clothing." A few weeks before standing for the presidency of the republic, he married his long-standing companion, the Green MP Doris Schmidauer (following a first divorce). During the final months of the election campaign, Van der Bellen sought to present himself as fairly moderate, with the aim of winning as many votes as possible from the country's two major historic parties, which had been dealt a severe defeat in the electoral round.