Electoral Panorama / Panorama Electoral

Austria's two major parties emerged from Sunday's early parliamentary election in the Central European country with their worst election results since 1945. Both the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) and the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) - which had ruled Austria in a grand coalition government for a year-and-a-half - lost ground with respect to the previous election, but Sunday's vote was a further major setback for the People's Party, coming on top of heavy losses in the 2006 legislative election, and the center-right party's gains since 1999 have now been completely wiped out. On the other hand, the Social Democrats had less severe losses, and the left-of-center party was able to top the poll once more.

Meanwhile, the election's big winners were the country's two far-right parties, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) and the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZÖ), the latter a 2005 FPÖ breakaway. Running separately, the two parties nearly doubled their combined share of the vote, which soared from 15.1% in 2006 to 29% this year - a figure which also stands above the FPÖ's best-ever result of 26.9% in 1999. In fact, other than for the division of the far-right vote between FPÖ and BZÖ, the outcome of this year's vote closely resembles that of the 1999 parliamentary election, and it is far from clear what kind of government will emerge from the election.

Federal Elections in Austria - Elections to the Nationalrat (National Council) has federal- and state-level results of parliamentary elections in Austria since 1945, including preliminary 2008 general election results.

Austria's SPÖ and ÖVP were not the only ruling parties to be humbled at the polls on Sunday. Just across the border, Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU) lost its absolute majority in the Landtag (state legislature) for the first time since 1962. However, the CSU - the Bavarian counterpart of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) - remains the largest party in Germany's wealthiest state, and barring an unlikely alliance of the four opposition parties that will be represented in the new Landtag - namely the Social Democrats (SPD), the Free Voters, the Greens and the Free Democrats (F.D.P.) - it's likely to remain in power in Munich, possibly in coalition with the liberal F.D.P., which secured Landtag representation for the first time since 1990.

The Bavarian State Office for Statistics and Data Processing has detailed results in German of Sunday's state election here.