Austria’s chancellor called for new elections following the dramatic collapse of his coalition government amid corruption allegations yesterday.
“Enough is enough”, Sebastian Kurz said in a televised address, following the resignation of his far-Right vice chancellor.
Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Freedom Party (FPÖ), was forced to step down after a video emerged in which he promised government contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch.
In a brief televised statement, Mr Kurz said he was not prepared to continue in coalition with the Freedom Party, and had asked the Austrian president for early elections.
As he spoke, thousands of people gathered outside the chancellery in Vienna chanting: “Kurz must go!”
Mr Strache was the first far-Right leader to ride the populist wave to power in a major European capital, and his resignation will come as a body blow to populists across the continent.
As right-wing populists held a rally in Italy ahead of European elections, he had to face the cameras back home.
Mr Strache’s dramatic fall from grace began late on Friday when two German publications released details of a video filmed secretly at a villa in Ibiza in 2017, months before the election that propelled the Freedom Party to power.
In the video, Mr Strache and another FPÖ politician, Johann Gudenus, are seen talking with a woman posing as a Russian oligarch who claims she wants to invest €250 million (£219 million) in the Austrian economy.
Mr Strache is seen encouraging her to buy a controlling stake in Krone Zeitung, Austria’s highest-selling newspaper, and reposition it to support his party in the forthcoming elections.
He suggests that once he is in power, lucrative government contracts will be awarded to the Russian woman’s business instead of to Austrian companies.
Extracts from the video were published by Germany’s Spiegel magazine and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper. It is unclear who made the video.
In a statement announcing his resignation, Mr Strache claimed he had been a victim of “political dirty tricks” – but admitted his filmed comments were “catastrophic and embarrassing”.
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Mr Strache maintained he had not done anything illegal – in the video he tells the Russian woman they must not break the law. “The only criminal offence here is the intelligence service-style honey trap,” he said.
He said he was resigning to allow the coalition government between the Freedom Party and Mr Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party to remain in power.
But Mr Kurz made it clear he was not prepared to continue with the coalition.
By taking his party into coalition with the Freedom Party, it was argued Mr Kurz had found a way to keep the populist far-Right under control. But the Freedom Party has dragged has government into a series of scandals.
Mr Strache’s resignation threatened to overshadow a rally of European populists convened by Matteo Salvini, the Italian interior minister, in Milan yesterday ahead of the European elections.
The rally brought together Mr Salvini and Marine Le Pen, of France’s National Rally, as well as populists from the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Belgium.