A high-profile scandal has sent shockwaves through Europe just days before critical EU Parliament elections in which populist parties are projected to make significant gains.
The scandal revolves around the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) – a junior member of the ruling coalition led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and a member of Matteo Salvini’s Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) political group in European Parliament. It broke when a video was published showing the FPO vice chancellor, Heinz Christian Strache, conversing with a woman he believed was the niece of a Russian oligarch. In the recording, Strache blithely discusses illicit ways for the billionaire to support the FPO, including a donations-for-government-contracts scheme and a takeover of one of Austria’s leading newspapers, the Kronen Zeitung, in order to provide more favorable coverage of the far-right party.
The affair has exploded like a bomb over the Austria political landscape. But will it make any difference at the ballot box?
Impact
The Kurz-led government of the center-right People’s Party and the far-right FPO now belongs to the past, a victim of the Strache recording. After the tape was made public, Strache stepped down from his position as vice chancellor. The resignation wasn’t enough for Chancellor Kurz, who declared that he’d reached his breaking point with his coalition partners and announced new elections for September. Kurz also canned the FPO interior minister, Herbert Kickl, even though Kickl was not directly implicated in the recording. The move against Hickl, incidentally whose portfolio includes conducting and monitoring the September elections, proved a step too far for the remaining FPO cabinet ministers, who proceeded to resign en masse from the Kurz government.
