Alexander Van der Bellen
Alexander Van der Bellen has been President of Austria since January 2017, elected as an independent backed by the Greens after the most contested and legally troubled presidential race in the country's postwar history. Born in Vienna in 1944 to a Russian aristocratic father who had fled the Bolsheviks and an Estonian mother, he grew up in the Tyrol and did not acquire Austrian citizenship until 1958. He trained as an economist at Innsbruck, took a doctorate, and became a professor of economics at the University of Vienna, specialising in public finance. He came to politics late, entering parliament for the Greens in 1994 and leading the party from 1997 to 2008, during which he took it from a fringe movement to an established parliamentary force. The 2016 presidential election became a European test case. He faced Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party and won the runoff in May by about thirty thousand votes. The Constitutional Court annulled the result in July over irregularities in the counting of postal ballots — the rerun was then postponed because the envelope glue failed — and the repeat vote in December 2016 gave him a clearer margin of about seven points. The Austrian presidency is mostly ceremonial but retains real powers, including dismissing the government. He used his authority in May 2019 when the Ibiza video destroyed the ÖVP-FPÖ coalition, appointing Brigitte Bierlein to lead a caretaker administration — Austria's first woman chancellor. He was re-elected in 2022 in the first round, and in early 2025 navigated a prolonged failure of coalition talks after the Freedom Party won the most votes.
- Lived: 1944 CE – ?
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: President of Austria (2017-present)
