This past Sunday, all of Austria looked in eager anticipation toward Salzburg, where the country’s mega election year kicked off with contests for the mayor and municipal council in the 150,000-resident city. As the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) has enjoyed a virtually constant lead in national polling over the past year and a half, many expect that 2024 will bring a considerable shift to the right in the Alpine Republic and perhaps even its first FPÖ chancellor. In the first round of elections, however, the party with most to celebrate certainly wasn’t the FPÖ.

Under an electoral list name KPÖ+ (the acronym PLUS stands for Independent Solidarity Platform), the Communist Party of Austria scored 23.1 percent of the vote in the city council election, a sixfold increase in its 2019 score of 3.7 percent. This was enough for a second-place finish — in front of the conservative People’s Party of Austria (ÖVP, 20.8 percent), the Greens (12.7 percent), the far-right FPÖ (10.8 percent), and several minor parties. Only the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) managed to finish ahead of the Communists, earning 25.6 percent. Yet the Social Democrats’ victory was tempered by the fact that their vote share fell slightly from 2019.

In Salzburg, the mayor is not elected by the city council, as is the norm in many other Austrian cities, but directly chosen by citizens on the same day as the city council. In the mayoral election, the KPÖ also secured second place: with 28 percent, the Communists’ Kay-Michael Dankl finished narrowly behind SPÖ deputy mayor Bernhard Auinger, who won 29.4 percent.