“I can promise you today that I will fight for change in this country with all my power,” he told a large crowd of cheering supporters.
“I accept this responsibility with great humility,” said the 31-year-old foreign minister, who is poised to become Austria’s next chancellor.
Kurz’s conservative People’s Party (OeVP) won 31.7%, 7.7 percentage points more than in the previous 2013 vote.
Foreign Minister Kurz has been the frontrunner in surveys since May, thanks to his plans to curb immigration by refugees and by workers from poorer eastern EU countries.
The far-right opposition Freedom Party (FPOe), which shares Kurz’s tough immigration policies, gained 5.4 points to win 25.9% of the votes.
“The result seems to show that many people opted for change,” deputy FPOe chief Norbert Hofer said.
The populist FPOe has been trying to shed its radical image in an effort to join a government after the election.
Kurz has signalled that a coalition with the FPOe is an option.
“We don’t exclude anything,” senior OeVP parliamentarian August Woeginger said yesterday evening.
When the first projection was announced at the OeVP’s election day headquarters, hundreds of party members cheered loudly when they learned of the FPOe results.
However, a continued co-operation between the OeVP and Chancellor Christian Kern’s Social Democratic Party (SPOe) can still not be ruled out, despite the deep rifts between the two centrist parties that led to the breakdown of their coalition in May.
The projection, which was based on 76% of counted votes, showed that SPOe came in second yesterday with 27% of the votes, nearly unchanged from 2013.
According to pre-election surveys, voters saw migration as the decisive issue.
Some 130,000 asylum-seekers applied for protection in Austria in 2015 and 2016.
Chancellor Kern has struggled to promote his plans to boost the economy during his campaign as his right-wing rivals banked on immigration issues.
He was also hurt by revelations that he had hired an Israeli spin doctor who operated fake websites to discredit Kurz.
The liberal Neos garnered 5.1%, the leftist Liste Pilz 4.3% and the environmental Greens 3.8%, according to the projection.
