The Austrian People's Party ( , ÃÂVP ) is a Christian-democratic and liberal-conservative political party in Austria.
Since January 2025, the party has been led by Christian Stocker (as an acting leader). It is currently the second-largest party in the National Council, with 51 of the 183 seats, and won 26.3% of votes cast in the 2024 legislative election. It holds seats in all nine state legislatures, and is part of government in seven, of which it leads six. The ÃÂVP is a member of the International Democracy Union and the European People's Party. It sits with the EPP group in the European Parliament; of Austria's 19 MEPs, 5 are members of the ÃÂVP. It is the second largest party in Europe by membership.
An unofficial successor to the Christian Social Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and thus also of the Fatherland Front, the ÃÂVP was founded immediately following the re-establishment of the Republic of Austria in 1945. Since then, it has been one of the two traditional major parties in Austria, alongside the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÃÂ). It was the most popular party until 1970, and has traditionally governed in a grand coalition with the SPÃÂ. It was the senior partner in grand coalitions from 1945 to 1966 and the junior partner from 1986 to 2000 and 2007âÂÂ2017. The ÃÂVP also briefly governed alone from 1966 to 1970. After the 1999 election, the party formed a coalition with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÃÂ) until 2003, when a coalition with the FPàsplinter Alliance for the Future of Austria was formed, which lasted until 2007.
The ÃÂVP is the successor of the Christian Social Party, a staunchly conservative movement founded in 1893 by Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna and highly controversial right-wing populist. Most of the members of the party during its founding belonged to the former Fatherland Front, which was led by chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, also a member of the Christian Social Party before the Anschluss. While still sometimes honored by ÃÂVP members for resisting Adolf Hitler, the regime built by Dollfuss was authoritarian in nature and has been dubbed as Austrofascism. In its present form, the ÃÂVP was established immediately after the restoration of Austria's independence in 1945 and it has been represented in both the Federal Assembly ever since. In terms of Federal Assembly seats, the ÃÂVP has consistently been the strongest or second-strongest party and as such it has led or at least been a partner in most Austria's federal cabinets.
In the 1945 Austrian legislative election, the ÃÂVP won a landslide victory in Austria's first postwar election, winning almost half the popular vote and an absolute majority in the legislature. However, memories of the hyper-partisanship that had plagued the First Republic prompted the ÃÂVP to maintain the grand coalition with the Communist Party of Austria (KPÃÂ) and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÃÂ) that had governed the country since the restoration of independence in early 1945. The ÃÂVP remained the senior partner in a coalition with the SPÃÂ until 1966 and governed alone from 1966 to 1970. It reentered the government in 1986, but has never been completely out of power since the restoration of Austrian independence in 1945 due to a longstanding tradition that all major interest groups were to be consulted on policy.
After the 1999 Austrian legislative election, several months of negotiations ended in early 2000 when the ÃÂVP formed a coalition government with the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÃÂ) led by Jörg Haider. The FPàhad won just a few hundred more votes than the ÃÂVP, but was considered far too controversial to lead a government. The ÃÂVP's Wolfgang Schüssel became ChancellorâÂÂthe first ÃÂVP Chancellor of Austria since 1970. This caused widespread outrage in Europe and the European Union imposed informal diplomatic sanctions on Austria, the first time that it imposed sanctions on a member state. Bilateral relations were frozen (including contacts and meetings at an inter-governmental level) and Austrian candidates would not be supported for posts in European Union international offices. Austria threatened to veto all applications by countries for European Union membership until the sanctions were lifted. A few months later, these sanctions were dropped as a result of a fact-finding mission by three former European prime ministers, the so-called "three wise men". The 2002 legislative election resulted in a landslide victory (42.27% of the vote) for the ÃÂVP under Schüssel. Haider's FPàwas reduced to 10.16% of the vote. At the state level, the ÃÂVP has long dominated the rural states of Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol and Vorarlberg. It is less popular in the city-state of Vienna and in the rural, but less strongly Catholic states of Burgenland and Carinthia. In 2004, it lost its plurality in the State of Salzburg, where they kept its result in seats (14) in 2009. In 2005, it lost its plurality in Styria for the first time.
After the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÃÂ) split from the FPÃÂ in 2005, the BZÃÂ replaced the FPÃÂ in the government coalition which lasted until 2007. Austria for the first time had a government containing a party that was founded during the parliamentary term. In the 2006 Austrian legislative election, the ÃÂVP were defeated and after much negotiations agreed to become junior partner in a grand coalition with the SPÃÂ, with new party chairman Wilhelm Molterer as Finance Minister and Vice-Chancellor under SPÃÂ leader Alfred Gusenbauer, who became Chancellor. The 2008 Austrian legislative election saw the ÃÂVP lose 15 seats, with a further 8.35% decrease in its share of the vote. However, the ÃÂVP won the largest share of the vote (30.0%) in the 2009 European Parliament election with 846,709 votes, although their number of seats remained the same.
The ÃÂVP had minor losses in the 2013 Austrian legislative election, and the grand coalition with the SPÃÂ continued until the 2017 Austrian legislative election, when the ÃÂVP changed its colour to turquoise and won its first legislative election since 2002. The party underwent a change in its image after Sebastian Kurz became chairman, changing its colour from the traditional black to turquoise, and adopting the alternate name The New People's Party (). It became the largest party after the 2017 election, and formed a coalition government with the FPÃÂ. This collapsed eighteen months later due to the Ibiza affair, leading to the 2019 election, after which the ÃÂVP formed a new coalition with The Greens.
An investigation into the Ibiza affair by a parliamentary subcommittee, an unstable Cabinet plagued by resignations, and ultimately a corruption inquiry, forced Kurz to resign the chancellorship in October 2021. Kurz was replaced by Karl Nehammer in 2021 as party leader and Chancellor. In the 2024 legislative election, the party fell to second behind the FPÃÂ. Following the surge of the FPÃÂ in various polls throughout late 2024 and early 2025, as well as the collapse of the ÃÂVP-SPÃÂ-NEOS coalition talks, Nehammer resigned as party leader and was replaced with Christian Stocker as acting leader. After failed talks with the FPÃÂ, the party would eventually form a coalition with the SPÃÂ and NEOS, with Stocker as Chancellor.
The ÃÂVP is described as Christian-democratic, conservative, and liberal-conservative. The party has also been described as a catch-all party of the centre-right, in the vein of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany. For most of its existence, the ÃÂVP has explicitly defined itself as Catholic and anti-socialist, with the ideals of subsidiarity as defined by the encyclical Quadragesimo anno and decentralisation.
For the first election after World War II, the ÃÂVP presented itself as the Austrian Party (), was anti-Marxist and regarded itself as the Party of the centre (). The ÃÂVP consistently held powerâÂÂeither alone or in so-called blackâÂÂred coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÃÂ)âÂÂuntil 1970, when the SPàformed a minority government with the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÃÂ). The ÃÂVP's economic policies during the era generally upheld a social market economy.
The party's campaign for the 2017 legislative election under the party chairman Sebastian Kurz was dominated by a rightward shift in policy which included a promised crackdown on illegal immigration and a fight against political Islam, making it more similar to the program of the FPÃÂ, the party that Kurz chose as his coalition partner after the ÃÂVP won the election. The party underwent a change in its image after Kurz became chairman, changing its colour from the traditional black to turquoise, and adopting the name The new People's Party ().
The chart below shows a timeline of ÃÂVP chairpersons and the Chancellors of Austria. The left black bar shows all the chairpersons (Bundesparteiobleute, abbreviated as CP) of the ÃÂVP party and the right bar shows the corresponding make-up of the Austrian government at that time. The red (SPÃÂ) and black (ÃÂVP) colours correspond to which party led the federal government (Bundesregierung, abbreviated as Govern.). The last names of the respective Chancellors are shown, with the Roman numeral standing for the cabinets.