Austria election: Van der Bellen defeats Hofer in presidential vote, by the ABC.

Austria has narrowly avoided becoming the first country in the European Union to vote in a far-right candidate as head of state, instead electing a 72-year-old former leader of the Greens party to be its next president. …

… Mr Van der Bellen [received] 50.3 per cent of the vote, compared to 49.7 per cent for Mr Hofer, who had run on an anti-immigration platform.

It’s curious that the ABC (very PC) describes it as a contest between the Greens and the “far right.” In modern PC jargon, “right-wing” has just come to mean “not PC”, and “far-right” just means “very non-PC.” The old meanings of “left” and “right” are almost irrelevant in the politically correct usage of those terms.

On Facebook, Brendan O’Neill said: “Extraordinary: 72% of working-class voters in Austria voted for Hofer, the far-right candidate, and only 5% of them voted for Van der Bellen, the green. This is the real story of the Austrian election: the left in Europe, and the European Union, now have no connection whatsoever with working-class people. The left is celebrating Hofer’s defeat, seemingly unaware that the more profound defeat is theirs. The rupture between the left and the working class in Europe is now complete.”

It is a conceit of the politically correct (the “left”) that they represent the working class (except when the workers are too racist to vote for the politically correct, or are too stupid to know what’s in their best interests, which is nearly all the time now).

The ABC goes on to tell us what what  it thinks everyone need to understand:

Mr Hofer’s defeat averts an embarrassing setback for Europe’s political establishment, which is increasingly under threat from populist parties that have profited from concerns about the region’s refugee crisis and years of weak growth and high unemployment.

“It’s a relief to see the Austrians reject populism and extremism,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on Twitter.

“Everyone in Europe must draw lessons from this.”

See Austria poised to elect far-Right president as Europe’s populist backlash deepens.