Almost two years ago, on October 29, 2015, Austrians were glued to their TV screens. Many were terrified by what they saw.
The Syrian, Afghan and other refugees who poured out of Turkey in response to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's promise of asylum had reached their country.
At Spielfeld, on the border with Slovenia, processing tents were overwhelmed, fences pushed down, systems ignored.
"They were streaming in, walking everywhere along the landscape," says Professor Reinhard Heinisch, chair of Austrian politics at the University of Salzburg. "It looked like a sea of humanity, pouring in and pushing all the local officials aside. It really scared a lot of people. Gun purchases went up afterwards. The mood shifted."
To some, it felt like an invasion.
Those fears, nurtured by tabloid media, fanned by a surging far-right political movement, and now given respectability by a charismatic young centre-right politician, look likely to change Austrian politics at this Sunday's election.
Says Heinisch: "This other half of the country, that has always felt very uncomfortable but had been silent, started again to dominate and come back with a vengeance.
"There is political change in the air."
For most of last year, the far-right populist Freedom Party surged in the polls to a clear lead. The party has a murky past: its first leader was a former Nazi and SS officer; its leader in the 1980s and '90s, Joerg Haider, was a friend of Muammar Gaddafi and courted controversy with comments seen as pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic.
The Freedom Party is still stridently anti-immigration and anti-Islam. But under current leader Heinz-Christian Strache it has found unprecedented electoral appeal. Last year its presidential candidate, Norbert Hofer, won the first round of the election and came within just a few tenths of a percentage point of victory.
During the asylum seeker surge, Austria took more refugees as a proportion of the population than Germany did - and without the buoyant economy to help absorb them. The Freedom Party played on the tensions this created, telling stories about schooling problems, security problems and refugee men harassing Austrian women.
In this election the party stands a good chance of ending up in government, probably as the junior partner.
And this is because of one man: Sebastian Kurz of the conservative People's Party.
"Mr Kurz is the most significant political talent to emerge in Austria in the past decade or so," says Heinisch.
Kurz's youth (he is 31, and was just 27 when he became the country's foreign minister in the current "grand coalition" government), charisma and intellect are reminiscent of Emmanuel Macron or Justin Trudeau.
But his politics are not.
When his fellow ministers watched the refugees arriving they were determined to welcome them, or at least manage their welcome. Kurz, however, almost immediately expressed doubts.
"Very early on he recognised that the refugee issue would be perceived more negatively in the future," Heinisch says. "He was one of the first in his own party to go against his party's mainstream, against his own government by drawing attention to the problem and the downside of all this."
When he took control of the People's Party in July, Kurz brought hardline positions with him. He wants to strengthen the EU's outer borders and ban NGOs from rescuing refugees in the Mediterranean. He proposes to cut and cap benefits for migrants, he wants migrant children to take compulsory language classes, and he thinks there shouldn't be any "Islamic kindergartens".
In New York last month, Kurz told the UN General Assembly "the world has never felt more insecure, at least not in my lifetime" (he was three when the Berlin Wall came down). Part of this insecurity was caused by the "migration crisis", he said.
"Uncontrolled migration leads to chaos ... Citizens need to have confidence that their governments decide who should cross the border."
There was a huge public response. The People's Party, formally renamed for the election "The Sebastian Kurz List - the new People's Party", shot ahead in the polls, and appears very likely to win the most votes on Sunday.
Strache complained in vain that Kurz's policies - not just on immigration, but on the economy, were virtually identical to his.
In TV debates Kurz has been "superbly articulate", Heinisch says.
"He has styled himself very much like a Macron, an outsider who is trying to be an iconoclast, breaking the mould of the current politics of his party.
"His composure and his style of rhetoric is very atypical for Austrian politicians, it's extremely polished. There's a cool kind of aloofness to him that's just the right touch, not too much and not too little."
His policies have caused some outrage - the office of the UN's refugee agency denounced "xenophobic debates and exclusionary tendencies" in the election campaign.
But they fit the national mood. This is a country that enacted a ban on face-covering veils this year despite protests from Muslim groups, lawyers and the country's own President.
The Austrian Chancellor, Social Democrat Christian Kern, has tried to pin Kurz down on substantive policies, to drag him down into the trenches on matters where his youth might betray inexperience.
"But he's made very few mistakes," says Heinisch. "Somehow he always escapes and stays above the fray."
This year each election in a European country has been seen as a marker on the barometer of far-right nationalism, to predict the political weather for the European Union as a whole.
In France's presidential poll, the establishment parties were routed by a charismatic pro-Europe centrist who then easily beat Marine Le Pen - whose National Front party has been in turmoil ever since. In the Netherlands the far-right Geert Wilders lost by a significant margin, but left the other parties in such disarray that it took more than 200 days to cobble together a four-party government.
In Germany, Merkel won another term in government, but the radical-right Alternative for Germany entered the Bundestag as the third biggest party.
Austria, similarly, is in the mood to shake things up.
"There is a strong sense in the public that they want change," Heinisch says.
And Austria may go one step further. If the current polls reflect the eventual result, then the Freedom Party is likely to end up in government.
Both Kurz and the Social Democrats have ruled out another grand coalition. It might still happen, but it is much more likely that Kurz would choose a coalition of the right.
Heinisch is cautious - he says a lot depends on how well smaller parties do. But the most likely scenario, he says, is that Strache will be the deputy chancellor in a Kurz government.
These are two men who have been sparring during the campaign over who is more chummy with Hungary's Viktor Orban.
They have already paved the way for coalition by settling some of their differences. Strache has toned down his anti-EU rhetoric and even claimed to be "pro-Europe" in an election debate.
But this will do little to calm nerves in Brussels. To add another concern to the mix, the Freedom Party is pals with the Kremlin: Strache visited Moscow in December to sign a co-operation accord with Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party, and says EU sanctions against Russia are "harmful and ultimately useless".
If Kurz becomes chancellor, the country will discover whether his jump to the right was a political tactic or conviction, Heinisch says.
Is he the "conservative Trudeau" of a few years ago, or has he hardened along with his rhetoric?
"He started by being about change and modernisation, liberalisation, but lately he's talked so much about immigration and foreigners that one wonders where is his heart," Heinisch says. "I think there is more of a hard ideological right-wing element to him, perhaps, where he sees foreigners as a cultural threat and it's not just a tactic [to take votes from the far right].
"He sounded [in the campaign] much tougher, somewhat more Islamophobic than I would have thought possible given what he has said just a few years ago ... we are wondering how serious he really is on this.
"I guess we have to wait and see."
