Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has called for the country to hold fresh elections following the resignation of his scandal-hit deputy, Heinz-Christian Strache.
Kurz on Saturday said a vote should be held “as soon as possible” hours after Strache, the vice chancellor and leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), resigned over a video sting and plunged Austria’s politics into crisis mode.
Kurz, who heads the centre-right People’s Party and leads Austria’s coalition government, said he had made his position known to Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen. Opposition parties including the Social Democrats, the liberal Neos party and the Greens have also called for fresh elections in the wake of the scandal.
“After yesterday’s video, I must say quite honestly: Enough is enough,” Kurz said.
Van der Bellen said later on Saturday that he had discussed the holding of a snap election with the Austrian chancellor and would meet with him again on Sunday to talk over the next steps.
‘Dumb, irresponsible, mistake’
The political turmoil erupted on Friday after Strache was shown in a sting video meeting a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch in 2017, shortly before the election that brought him to power as part of the FPO-People’s Party coalition administration.
In the footage – aired by the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung and weekly Der Spiegel newspapers – the far-right Strache was seen offering state contracts in exchange for political and financial backing.
Addressing reporters during his resignation speech on Saturday, Strache said: “It was dumb, it was irresponsible and it was a mistake.”
He maintained, however, that he had done nothing illegal and described the sting as a “targeted political assassination”.
Al Jazeera’s Sonia Gallego, reporting from London, described the timing of the scandal as “very bad” for Strache’s party with key European Union (EU) elections scheduled for next week.
“This has been quite an extraordinary downfall for the leader of the Freedom Party … just only a week to go until the European elections,” Gallego said, adding the incident had raised “a lot of questions” about how the FPO “finances its own coffers”.
EU parliamentarian Hans-Olaf Henkel said the party “as well as many other right-wing parties in Europe are apparently much-supported by Russia”.
“For the first time, with the Austrian far-right party, we have found a smoking gun and that‘s why Strache had to resign,” Henkel told Al Jazeera from the German capital, Berlin.
SOURCE:
Al Jazeera and news agencies
from Update News Topic http://bit.ly/2YDG3l9
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