VIENNA, November 24 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservatives won the most votes in the Austrian general election Sunday, November 24, with 42.27% but his outgoing coalition partner Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party plummeted, according to exit polls.

Austrian Interior Minister Ernst Strasser said the Social Democrat Party (SPOe) had won 36.90 percent while the Greens had 8.96 percent, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Haider's anti-immigration, anti-Europe party scored 10.2 percent of the vote, losing almost two-thirds of the nearly 27 percent it won in the general election in 1999 when it shocked Europe by entering the government.

However, the party, which lost support due to bickering between Haider and more moderate Freedom Party Ministers, could still return to the ruling coalition, since Schuessel needs its votes for a parliamentary majority, according to estimates by national television ORF with most votes counted.

Schuessel's People Party (OeVP) scored 42.3 percent, putting it well ahead of Austria's other main party, the SPOe of Alfred Gusenbauer which won 37 percent, the first time the socialists failed to be the top party since 1966.

The OeVP won only 26.91 percent of the vote in the 1999 election while the socialists had 33.15 percent.

OeVP Agriculture Minister Wilhelm Mollerer said voters had given a "clear signal that they want Schuessel to remain as chancellor" after a campaign that had pitted his austerity-oriented program against Gusenbauer's calls for socially oriented policies that would maintain pension levels and cut taxes.

SPOe spokeswoman Doris Bures said the socialists expect Schuessel to "form a new coalition with the far-right."

But she did not rule out a national left-right government that would join Schuessel's conservatives with the socialists. Austria has had such a "grand" coalition for most of the time since World War II.

Political analyst Peter Filzmaier said: "It is clear not only that Schuessel will be chancellor but that he has in hand all the different ways to form a coalition."

He said most of the Freedom Party voters who defected had gone to the People's Party and that this was "a success for Schuessel's campaign which had focused on continuity, on trustworthiness and which benefited from the chancellor building the campaign around himself."

The Freedom Party forced the snap elections in September due to its internal bickering which caused the collapse of the coalition.

FPOe main candidate Herbert Haupt admitted his party had not reached its election goals of 15 percent but he said "voters want to continue with black-blue," that is a conservative/far-right coalition.

The Greens, led by Alexander Van der Bellen, scored 8.9 percent, against 7.4 percent in 1999, according to estimates.

Schuessel could return to power in a new coalition with the Freedom Party, even though analysts believe Haider wants to use the fall of his party as a chance to rebuild from the opposition.

A national right-left coalition, the so-called black-red combination, is possible but Gusenbauer had said he would remain in the opposition if his party was not number one.

Hopes for a red-Green coalition of the socialists and the Greens, appear dashed as the two parties do not have a combined majority, according to the estimates.

Van der Bellen has said his Greens will not ally themselves with Schuessel's conservatives.

Schuessel mentioned during the campaign the possibility of his party forming a minority government alone, perhaps with tacit Freedom Party support.

Schuessel, 57, has won a reputation for strategic thinking and nerves of steel.

Two weeks before the election, he continued to outmaneuver the Freedom Party when its superstar, Finance Minister Karl-Heinz Grasser, switched sides saying he would serve as an independent minister in a new Schuessel government.