page_title: Alexander Van der Bellen
section_title: Joining politics
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Van der Bellen / Political career / Joining politics
caption_attribution_description: Alexander Van der Bellen
context_page_description: Alexander Van der Bellen is the current President of Austria. He previously served as a professor of economics at the University of Vienna, and after joining politics, as the spokesman of the Austrian Green Party.
  As a descendant of the Russian aristocratic von der Bellen family of patrilineal Dutch ancestry, he was born in Austria to Russian and Estonian parents who were refugees from Stalinism, and became a naturalized citizen of Austria together with his parents in 1958. He was a member of the National Council representing the Green Party there from 1994 to 2012, and served as both leader of the party as well as its parliamentary group.
  He ran as a nominally independent candidate supported by the Greens in the 2016 presidential election, and finished second out of six in the first round before winning the second round against Norbert Hofer, a member of the Freedom Party. On 1 July, before he was due to be sworn into office, the results of the second round of voting were annulled by the Constitutional Court due to absentee votes being improperly counted too early, requiring the election to be re-held.
context_section_description: Van der Bellen was a member of the Social Democratic Party from the mid-1970s until the late 1980s, but his interests later turned towards the environmental movement. His former postgraduate Peter Pilz, back then the spokesman of the Green Party, brought Van der Bellen into his party. Van der Bellen later described these changes as a development "from an arrogant anti-capitalist to a generous left-liberal", although the latter self-image in his autobiography of 2015 also changed into a "liberal Anglo-Saxon coinage".
  In 1992, Van der Bellen was nominated by the Greens for the office of the President of the Court of Audit; he was defeated by the ÖVP-close Franz Fiedler. After the Greens suffered significant losses in the 1995 legislative elections on 17 December, Van der Bellen took over the party chairmanship from Christoph Chorherr in December 1997 and remained until October 2008, being the longest-serving spokesman in the history of the Austrian Greens, with almost eleven years in office.
  He assumed chairmanship with the party having 4.8% approval in polls at that time. He led the party through three elections, each higher than the last: in the 1999 legislative elections the party got 7.4% of the vote, in the 2002 legislative elections it got 9.5% of the vote, and in the 2006 legislative elections the party got 11.05% of the vote.
  After losses in the 2008 legislative elections, in which the Green Party's voteshare dropped to 10.11%, Van der Bellen,  dubbed "the green professor" by the media, resigned on 3 October 2008 as spokesman of the Green Party. He handed over the office to the Third President of the National Council at the time, Eva Glawischnig. As designated spokesperson she was elected administrative party leader on 24 October and later officially endorsed and sworn in by the party congress (Bundeskongress).
caption: Van der Bellen in 2004
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