It is currently the second-largest party in the National Council, with 51 of the 183 seats, and won 26.3% of votes cast in the 2024 legislative election.

An unofficial successor to the Christian Social Party of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ÖVP was founded immediately following the re-establishment of the Republic of Austria in 1945.

The ÖVP is the successor of the Christian Social Party, a staunchly conservative movement founded in 1893 by Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna and highly controversial right-wing populist.

While still sometimes honored by ÖVP members for resisting Adolf Hitler, the regime built by Dollfuss was authoritarian in nature and has been dubbed as Austrofascism.

In its present form, the ÖVP was established immediately after the restoration of Austria's independence in 1945 and it has been represented in both the Federal Assembly ever since.

It reentered the government in 1986, but has never been completely out of power since the restoration of Austrian independence in 1945 due to a longstanding tradition that all major interest groups were to be consulted on policy.

After the 1999 Austrian legislative election, several months of negotiations ended in early 2000 when the ÖVP formed a coalition government with the right-wing populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) led by Jörg Haider.

Bilateral relations were frozen (including contacts and meetings at an inter-governmental level) and Austrian candidates would not be supported for posts in European Union international offices.

[2] Austria threatened to veto all applications by countries for European Union membership until the sanctions were lifted.

[3] A few months later, these sanctions were dropped as a result of a fact-finding mission by three former European prime ministers, the so-called "three wise men".

In the 2006 Austrian legislative election, the ÖVP were defeated and after much negotiations agreed to become junior partner in a grand coalition with the SPÖ, with new party chairman Wilhelm Molterer as Finance Minister and Vice-Chancellor under SPÖ leader Alfred Gusenbauer, who became Chancellor.

[5] This collapsed eighteen months later due to the Ibiza affair, leading to the 2019 election, after which the ÖVP formed a new coalition with The Greens.