Austria will stay pro-European, election victor tells Brussels
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Austria's likely next chancellor assured European Union leaders on Thursday of his support for the EU, allaying concerns that his country would become a dissonant voice in the bloc with the far right expected to enter its government. Sebastian Kurz of the mainstream conservative OVP party won a parliamentary election on Sunday after campaigning on an anti-immigration platform, and a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) is widely anticipated. Arriving at a meeting of conservative EU leaders, the 31-year-old Kurz said he would speak to all parties in the Austrian parliament before deciding on a governing partner. "Any government I form will be a pro-European one," Kurz, who has been the Alpine republic's foreign minister since 2013, told reporters. "I'm not just glad we have this European Union, but I also see it as the responsibility of my younger generation to actively engage and shape the EU in a positive way." Kurz, who will not represent Austria at regular EU summits until he forms a government, also met European Council President Donald Tusk and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker. Tusk, a former Polish prime minister, hailed Kurz on Twitter as a "truly pro-European winner of the Austrian elections". Austria became a member of the European Union in 1995 after a two-thirds majority voted to join the bloc. Recent opinion polls show three-quarters of Austrians want the affluent country to remain a member of the EU. The FPO, which won over a quarter of Austria's vote to the conservatives' nearly 32 percent, gained from public unease over a large influx of mostly Muslim migrants into Europe in 2015. Once anti-EU, the FPO now professes to be pro-Europe but wants Brussels to hand back more powers to member states. (Reporting by Robert-Jan Bartunek and Robin Emmott; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Mark Heinrich)
