Alexander "Sascha" Van der Bellen (German: [alɛkˈsandɐ fan deːɐ̯ ˈbɛlən]; born 18 January 1944), also referred to by the abbreviation VdB, is an Austrian politician serving as the president of Austria since 2017.

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.

He is a descendant of the former Russian Empire's aristocratic Van der Bellen family of patrilineal Dutch ancestry dating back to the 18th century.

Van der Bellen is the second Green president of a European Union country (after Raimonds Vējonis of Latvia) and the first to be directly elected by popular vote.

During the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) part of his family escaped from the Bolsheviks and migrated to the newly independent Estonia.

In 1931, Van der Bellen's father Alexander married his Estonian mother, Alma Sieboldt in Kihelkonna, Saaremaa, Estonia.

In February or March 1941, Van der Bellen's father, mother, and older sister Vivian-Diana moved to Nazi Germany; in line with the German–Soviet Frontier Treaty they were accepted as the so-called Volksdeutsche.

Via Lauksargiai (former Laugszargen, Memelland) and a German resettlement camp in Werneck at Würzburg, Van der Bellen's parents moved to Vienna, where their son Alexander was born in 1944 and baptized into the Lutheran Church.

As the Red Army approached Vienna, the family escaped to the Kauner valley in Tyrol, where his father later became active as a businessman again.

From 1968 to 1971 he served as scientific assistant to Clemens August Andreae at the Institute for Public Finance at the University of Innsbruck, and from 1972 to 1974 as a research fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

He established friendship with Turkish economist Murat R. Sertel, with whom he worked on decision and preference theories and later on published several articles and discussion papers.

Since December 2015 Van der Bellen has been married to a longtime friend and managing director of the Greens Club, Doris Schmidauer.

[14][15] According to his own statement, Van der Bellen joined the only existing Freemason chapter in Innsbruck at the time, although he participated at meetings for a year, which he described as "being active".

"After that, as a purely passive member, I paid the membership fee for about 10 years and finally left on my explicit request" ("Danach habe ich als rein passives Mitglied noch etwa 10 Jahre lang den Mitgliedsbeitrag bezahlt und bin schließlich auf meinen expliziten Wunsch hin ausgeschieden"), Van der Bellen in a ZIB 2 elections interview with Armin Wolf (18 May 2016).

After Van der Bellen's victory in the 2016 Austrian presidential elections, President of Estonia Toomas Hendrik Ilves congratulated him.

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.

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.

legislative period on 7 November 1994 Van der Bellen functioned as a member of the National Council for the first time and held this position until 2012.

While he himself volunteered this activity, in addition to his still exercised National Council mandate, the new infrastructure office for him with a budget of 210,000 euros annually was endowed.

At the 2010 Viennese state elections on 10 October Van der Bellen stood as a candidate on the 29th place of the list of the Vienna Greens.

Although he stated in multiple interviews: "Should I get the preferential votes and it comes to a red-green government, I will definitely move into the Landtag", he still did not accept the Gemeinderat mandate after the elections and remained in the National Council til 5 July 2012.

On 14 June 2012, Van der Bellen announced in a press conference to swap from the National Council to the Vienna Gemeinderat and Landtag.

In January 2015, it was announced that Van der Bellen would retreat from Vienna's municipal politics at the end of the legislative period.

"[24][25] Amid the 2024 Austrian legislative election, Van der Bellen pledged to ensure the formation of a government that respects the "foundations of our liberal democracy".

[32] However, Van der Bellen officially suspended his party membership at the Greens as of 23 May 2016, demonstrating his willingness to strive for a nonpartisan incumbency.

[33] Regardless of that the Green Party still supported him during his campaign; establishing the Association "Together for Van der Bellen – Independent Initiative for the 2016 Presidential Election" which comprised six employees and premises as well as 1.2 million euros financial aid.

[36] In comparison, Van der Bellen's run-off opponent Norbert Hofer was vested with 3.4 million euros by his party.

On 8 June, Freedom Party chairman Heinz-Christian Strache brought in a 150-page notice of appeal to the Constitutional Court, which was intended to highlight deficiencies in the conduct of the second voting round.

[41] Van der Bellen also won the second runoff election postponed to 4 December 2016, receiving 53.8% of valid votes (with a voter turnout of 74.2%).