At the federal presidential election of 6 May 1951, the FPÖ’s predecessor party, the VdU, nominated Dr Burghard Breitner as its candidate. He achieved 15.41 per cent, about 600,000 votes.

At Austria’s first popular federal presidential election, Theodor Körner (SPÖ) defeated the ÖVP’s candidate, Heinrich Gleißner, at the run-off election and thus became Federal President.

The first Federal President had in 1945 not yet been elected by "popular vote", but by the Parliament, so the 1951 federal presidential election marked the first direct election of its kind in the Second Republic.

The candidate of the Verband des Unabhängigen (VdU) was Dr Burghard Breitner, a medical practitioner who enjoyed great popularity as the “Angel of Siberia”, for having during the First World War, whilst himself a prisoner of war, worked as a doctor in Russia.