Vienna - After Austria's far-right parties won 27 additional parliamentary seats in Sunday's elections, a new batch of legislators known for their extremist views and affiliations is set to step onto the national political stage.

Heinz-Christian Strache's Freedom Party and Joerg Haider's smaller Alliance for the Future of Austria were known for their anti- immigration and anti-Islamic sentiments before Sunday.

But as the parties collected 29 per cent of the vote (18 per cent for the Freedom Party and 11 per cent for the Alliance), politicians who were used to spreading their views without attracting media attention are about to enter the spotlight.

When Freedom Party candidate Susanne Winter takes her seat in parliament, she will already be known to most Austrians for her statement made in January that the Prophet Mohammed was a paedophile.

The incident caused an outcry among Austria's 400,000 Muslims, who account for over 4 per cent of the population.

The local politician from Graz has also expressed her suspicion that Muslims are prone to sexual deviance.

Winter is set to stand trial later this autumn as her statements have earned her charges of incitement and debasement of a religion.

"We were completely shocked" about Winter's likely new role as a legislator, said Barbara Liegel, the executive director of ZARA, an organization that monitors racism in Austria.

"People like Winter are a clear signal to voters on the far-right fringe," Liegel said.

Although voters were also attracted by the Freedom Party's and the Alliance's xenophobic rhetoric, experts said the main factor was their frustration about the ruling coalition of Social Democrats and mainstream Conservatives.

Some 33,000 foreigners settled in Austria last year. Around 17 per cent of the population of 8.3 million are first- or second-generation immigrants, many from former Yugoslavia and Turkey.

"The gain in votes does not mean that more Austrians now harbour an extremist ideology," political scientist Peter Filzmaier said.

Extremist voters were in the one-digit percentile range, he said, comparable to other countries.

Nevertheless, the 839,520 Austrians who cast their ballots for the Freedom party seemed to have no qualms about supporting Werner Koenigshofer, a former member of the extremist National Democratic Party, who is also set to become a member of the 183-seat parliament.

The party was dissolved in 1988 for violating Austria's law that prohibits Nazi activities.

These two politicians are just examples from a number of other likely new Freedom Party parliamentarians, such as Vienna assemblyman Harald Stefan, who said last year that recognizing Islam as an official religion was problematic as long as it used violence to implement its goals.

Although Joerg Haider's Alliance seeks to distance itself from the extremist rhetoric of the Freedom Party, it will give a seat in parliament to right-wingers including the ultra-conservative Ewald Stadler, who has compared abortion with the Holocaust.

Both the Social Democrats (SPOe) and the conservative People's Party (OeVP) have said they would not form coalitions with the far right.

But observers such as ZARA's Liegel are concerned that the strengthened right wing would influence the policies of the mainstream parties.

"I am concerned that even if they are not in government they will very strongly dictate the political agenda, because the SPOe and OeVP are are afraid to lose even more voters," she said.

While both right-wing parties are mulling the final list of new parliamentarians, their colleagues in other extremist movements in Europe are taking note.

The Freedom Party has contact with the nationalist Flemish party Vlaams Belang in Belgium, with Jean Marie Le Pen's French Front National, and with the ultra-right Alternativa Sociale in Italy.

The success of the Austrian right wing showed that "a growing number of voters shared the struggle for more security and against creeping foreign infiltration," said Alternativa Sociale's leader Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, in an interview with the Austrian newspaper Der Standard. (dpa)