Austrian federal election, 1947 (Cinco De Mayo)

The Austrian federal election of 1947 was a watershed election in Austria conducted on March 15, 1947 to elect the lower house of the Parliament of Austria. With the dissolution of the War Government the prior December following V-E Day in Europe in May of 1946, Austria had been governed for three months by a rough coalition of Worker's Party (AP) leader Adolf Hitler as Chancellor with a Cabinet of Christian Socialists, Social Democrats and Liberals. All four parties contested the election, along with the Communist Party, which was backed by the UBPR and had most of its support in non-German speaking regions of Austria.

With the Workers Party, Christian Democrats and Liberals largely splitting the right and right-center, the Social Democrats won an overwhelming electoral victory, seizing 157 of 250 seats in the lower house despite only earning 43% of the vote. Adolf Schärf was inducted as the first democratically elected postwar Chancellor and the first Chancellor elected under the constitutional reforms constructed in 1942, and it would be first of three times he would serve as Chancellor as power changed hands within the Social Democratic Party. Geopolitically, the election led to the early 1950s dissolution of Austria, where the once-vast Austrian Empire collapsed into numerous states, although the 1950 and 1951 elections would prove much more important to the events in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Transylvania.

The election marked the effective end of War Chancellor Adolf Hitler's political career - though he attempted to stage a comeback in the 1950 and 1951 federal elections as the head of the Worker's Party, he failed on both attempts to gain more than the 10% mandate required to win seats in the lower house.