The end of June brought a surprise in Graz, Austria, as Mayor Siegfried Nagl — a mainstay of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) — called snap elections for September 26. The capital of the southeastern Styria region, the 300,000-strong city could have held the election as late as next February, and Nagl’s move prompted outrage from his coalition partners in the right-populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Rumors are circulating that Nagl’s real intention in holding the snap poll is to swap these far-right allies for the Greens — an ostensibly center-left but eminently pliable party who are already in coalition with the ÖVP in Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s federal government.

Yet this isn’t the only story in Austria’s second-largest city. For the real challenger to the conservatives isn’t the Greens but a party much further to its Left. Currently polling second place in the run-up to the September 26 poll is the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) — a party every bit as proud of its radicalism as its name suggests.

These poll scores build on recent successes. In fact, the KPÖ has finished second in half of the elections in Graz since the turn of the millennium while achieving double-digit vote percentages in every single vote. In the most recent election, in 2017, the party even earned 20.3 percent, winning twelve seats on the city council and city senate. By comparison, the other two left-of-center parties, the Greens and the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), won eleven seats combined. This marked the second time that Graz’s Communists broke the 20 percent mark, after first doing so in 2003.