NR election

Austria’s electorate is getting older and older

A quarter of those eligible to vote this year are 65 years old or older.

(Bild: APA/EVA MANHART)

The electorate is getting older and older, making senior citizens an increasingly important target group for the parties in the election campaign. In the National Council elections in two weeks' time, more than a quarter of eligible voters will be aged 65 or over for the first time.

Over the past 30 years, the number of voters of retirement age has grown by 45 percent, while the number of eligible voters has only increased by nine percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of young voters is getting smaller and smaller.

Number of eligible voters has fallen
Almost 1.7 of the total of 6.3 million eligible voters are aged 65 or over, according to data from Statistics Austria as of January 1. This corresponds to a share of 27 percent. Thirty years ago, senior citizens made up only a fifth of the 5.7 million eligible voters living in Austria at the time, at 20 percent. Over the past ten years, the total number of eligible voters has actually fallen slightly as a result of demographic trends, while the over-65 age group has continued to grow - by 13% since 2014.

At the same time, the proportion of young voters continues to fall - even though the voting age was lowered from 18 to 16 in 2007. In 1994, 1.3 million citizens were still between 18 and 29 years old and therefore just under a quarter (23%) of eligible voters were under 30. Ten years later, in 2004, this only applied to one million or 18% of Austrians of voting age.

This trend was also an argument for lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 as part of an electoral law reform in 2007. However, the measure was only able to temporarily mitigate the ageing of the electorate, as the data shows. With the addition of 16 and 17-year-olds, the group of eligible voters under 30 grew again to 1.2 million in 2014, with young voters making up a fifth of eligible voters. In the past ten years, however, the proportion has fallen again and has now reached a low of 17%. Only one million of the 6.3 million eligible voters in the National Council elections are under 30.

Young immigrants not eligible to vote
In addition to the ageing population, this development is also due to the fact that many young immigrants living in Austria are not eligible to vote. Among people without Austrian citizenship, the proportion of over-65-year-olds is significantly lower at nine percent, while that of 16-29-year-olds is slightly higher at 25 percent than among citizens.

The oldest electorate is in the first district in Vienna (Innere Stadt), where 34.7 percent of eligible voters are over 65 years old, followed by the districts of Leoben (33.3), Bruck-Mürzzuschlag and Güssing (33.1 each). The highest proportion of young voters can be found in the Viennese districts of Alsergrund (22.8), Margareten and Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus (both 22.1) as well as in Graz (21.2).

Impact on voting behavior
It is not easy to say to what extent the increasing age of the electorate affects voting behavior. In the last National Council election five years ago, the ÖVP under Sebastian Kurz owed its election victory in large part to senior citizens. According to an election day survey conducted by the SORA Institute (now Foresight) for ORF, 43% of people over the age of 60 voted for the Turks, compared to 38% of 30-59-year-olds and only 27% of those under 30. The SPÖ also scored above average among older people at the time. 31% of over-60s voted for the Reds, compared to just 20% of younger people (30-59-year-olds) and 14% (under-30s). In contrast, the FPÖ, NEOS and Greens performed worse among senior citizens than overall. The Greens scored highest among young voters at the time. 27 percent of the under-30s voted Green, but only 5 percent of the 60-plus generation.