The Austrian cabinet has set November 24th as the date for a snap election prompted by the collapse of the centre-right coalition over a power struggle within Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party.
Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's cabinet fixed the date after parliament voted on Friday to dissolve itself, paving the way for a general election almost a year earlier than scheduled in October 2003, a government spokeswoman said.
Schuessel broke up the coalition between his conservative People's Party and the Freedom Party on September 9 after Haider led a revolt in his party that ousted its chairwoman, Vice Chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer.
The opposition Social Democrats, who have dominated most coalitions since World War Two, are leading in public opinion polls, with around 39 percent compared to 35 percent for Schuessel's conservatives at 35 percent.
The Freedom Party's rating has plunged to 13 percent against the 27 percent it won in the 1999 election, which catapulted the anti-immigration Haider's party from the fringes into a coalition with the People's Party in 2000.
The opposition Green Party is polling around 12 percent.
Analysts say that a "red-green" German-style coalition of the Social Democrats and the Green Party is a very likely scenario. A recent poll showed that 80 percent of Austrians were opposed to a renewal of the Freedom Party-People's Party coalition.