Waldheim Narrowly Misses Presidential Win; Faces Run-off Election June 8

Kurt Waldheim, whose alleged participation in Nazi war crimes provoked a bitter worldwide controversy, narrowly missed victory in Austria’s Presidential elections Sunday and will face a run-off election on June 8.

The final returns broadcast by Vienna Radio gave Waldheim, the candidate of the conservative People’s Party, 49.66 percent of the vote against 43.66 percent for his Socialist rival, Kurt Steyrer. A vote of 50 percent or more is required to avoid a run-off.

Early projections had indicated that neither candidate would gain 50 percent of the vote. With more than three quarters of the ballots counted it appeared for a time that Waldheim would take the elections by a 51-42 percent margin. But officials refused to predict the outcome until the final count, noting that Waldheim’s vote had oscillated by more than three points in the course of two hours after the polls closed.

Waldheim, who served as Secretary General of the United Nations from 1972-1981, had been a clear favorite according to public opinion polls during the past month, even as evidence continued to unfold that he may have been a participant in and certainly knew about the murders of Yugoslav partisans when he was a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in the Balkans during World War II, and about the deportation of Greek Jews from Salonika, Crete and Rhodes.

Waldheim flatly denied the charges but his explanations were less than unequivocal. He finally admitted knowledge of atrocities but insisted that he had no part in them.

The inconclusive results of Sunday’s elections are attributable to the votes garnered by two minor candidates, Freda Meisner-Blau, an environmental activist, and rightwing nationalist Otto Scrinzi.