Centrumrechtse partij van Schüssel verliest verkiezingen Oostenrijk (en)

The EU is set to lose another of its familiar faces on the political stage following Sunday's election defeat of Austrian chancellor Wolfgang Schussel at the hands of Austria's social democrats.

Although polls before the elections had still indicated a tight victory for the conservative Mr Schussel, results on Sunday (1 October) showed that his comfortable campaign slogan "we're doing well here" was not well received by voters.

Mr Schussel's centre-right Austrian People's Party lost 8.1 percentage points ending up with 34.2 percent of the votes, coming in second after the social democrats who scored 35.7 percent.

Alfred Gusenbauer, the social democrat leader and likely new chancellor, said after the surprise result "I confess, I am touched."

Mr Schussel, having a hard time coming to terms with the election result, said "we hand over the country in a state which is better than ever before."

Austrian media predict that a grand coalition of social democrats and conservatives will be the most likely outcome of upcoming coalition talks, in a scenario which would exclude the two right-wing parties, the Freedom Party and the Future of Austria Coalition (BZ).

The Freedom Party came in third winning 11.2 percent of the votes, while the BZ made it back into the Austrian parliament winning 4.2 percent.

The BZ was founded in 2005 by the rightist politician Jorg Haider, the man behind the success of the Freedom Party which scored a historic 27 percent of the votes in 1999 elections.

When the Freedom Party subsequently joined Mr Schussel in a coalition government in 2000, EU leaders decided to impose sanctions on Austria, "diplomatically isolating" the country.

The ineffective sanctions were however quickly lifted and Mr Schussel later became a respected figure on the EU political stage, using Vienna's presidency of the first half of this year to promote the revival of the shelved EU constitution.