By Francois Murphy
VIENNA (Reuters) – The management of Austria’s ruling conservatives held a disaster assembly on Sunday to select a successor to Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who introduced his resignation on Saturday as makes an attempt to kind a coalition authorities with out the far proper fell aside.
The shock collapse of three- after which two-party talks geared toward cobbling collectively a centrist coalition that might function a bulwark towards the far-right Freedom Celebration (FPO) after the FPO got here first in September’s parliamentary election leaves President Alexander Van der Bellen with few choices.
A snap election with assist for the eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO nonetheless rising or an about-face during which Van der Bellen duties FPO chief Herbert Kickl with forming a authorities are actually the almost definitely choices, with solely restricted scope for alternate options or taking part in for time.
“It isn’t a straightforward scenario,” Markus Wallner, the governor of Vorarlberg, the westernmost of Austria’s 9 provinces, instructed reporters earlier than the Folks’s Celebration (OVP) management assembly on the chancellor’s workplace.
“I consider we should do all the pieces we are able to now to keep away from sliding in the direction of a nationwide disaster.”
Wallner stated he opposed a snap election since that might delay the arrival of a brand new authorities by months. OVP governors are a part of the management.
Nehammer insisted throughout and after the election marketing campaign that his social gathering wouldn’t govern with Kickl as a result of he was an excessive amount of of a conspiracy theorist and posed a safety threat whereas on the similar time saying a lot of Kickl’s social gathering was reliable.
Nehammer’s departure makes it seemingly that whoever succeeds him shall be extra open to a coalition with the FPO, which is formally allied with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz social gathering.
GROWING SUPPORT FOR FPO
The FPO received September’s election with round 29% of the vote, and opinion polls counsel its assist has solely grown since then, extending its lead over the OVP and Social Democrats to greater than 10 share factors whereas their assist has shrunk.
The OVP and FPO overlap on numerous points, significantly taking a troublesome line on immigration, to the purpose that the FPO has accused the OVP of stealing its concepts.
The 2 ruled collectively from late 2017 till 2019, when a video-sting scandal involving the then-leader of the FPO prompted their coalition’s collapse. On the state stage, they govern collectively in 5 of 9 states, together with in OVP average Wallner’s Vorarlberg.
The nationwide dynamic is now completely different as a result of in the event that they had been to kind an alliance the OVP would for the primary time be junior accomplice to the FPO, making the place of OVP chief troublesome and undesirable to many.
After preliminary media experiences that family names like former social gathering chief Sebastian Kurz, who led the final coalition with the FPO and has since been convicted of perjury, might turn out to be OVP chief, Austrian media reported in a single day that they had been now not within the working.
That left lesser-known figures resembling new Chamber of Commerce Secretary-Normal Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer, 45.
In the meantime, the FPO hammered residence its message.
“Austria wants a Chancellor Kickl now,” it stated on X.
