Alexander Van der Bellen is Austria's new president. Only the official announcement from the Interior Ministry is still awaited, but the 72-year-old ecologist, former university professor and independent candidate (though backed by the Greens) has beaten far-right candidate Norbert Hofer by a handful of votes. Hofer's party, the FPÖ, had swept the field in the first round.

The deciding factor was the approximately 900,000 postal votes cast by Austrian citizens. This was a far from negligible share, equal to 14 per cent of the total — it should be noted that in Austria only 6.4 million people are eligible to vote.

Projections pointed to total uncertainty

Van der Bellen's victory comes, however, in a divided country, following an extremely tight neck-and-neck race between the two candidates. The very first exit polls released from 5pm on Sunday — when polling stations closed — were immediately unambiguous: Austria had effectively split in two between the far-right candidate and the Green one. The initial projections had given Hofer the lead with 50.2 per cent of the vote. A few dozen minutes later, the result appeared to have been reversed, with 50.1 per cent in favour of Van der Bellen.

Then came total uncertainty: based on the count of ballots not cast by post (that is, the only real data available at that point), Hofer had received 144,000 more votes than his opponent. But postal votes are usually unfavourable to the FPÖ leader: suffice it to recall that in the first round the party's overall result was 35 per cent, yet in the postal vote the figure did not exceed 25. So, on Sunday evening the final projection had indicated a perfect tie between the two: 50 against 50.

Van der Bellen wins Vienna, Hofer wins the Brenner

In terms of vote distribution, it is worth noting that Van der Bellen achieved excellent results across the city of Vienna, the capital, which also accounts for a significant proportion of the country's population. Another win came in Vorarlberg, the region on the border with Switzerland. Hofer, by contrast, won in Tyrol (though not by a landslide: with 50.7 per cent) — the epicentre of his campaign. The far-right candidate had staked everything on the issue of migrants and the need to close the Brenner Pass to bar their way.

More broadly, those who chose the Green candidate tended to be more highly educated, both women and men. Hofer, meanwhile, drew his support more strongly from male voters, with a surge among blue-collar workers, who voted en masse (86 per cent) for the FPÖ candidate. The result, in any case, is a country split literally in two — with the traditional centre-right and centre-left parties as the real big losers of the electoral round.