Austrian Chancellor to resign after coalition talks fail. Image: Britain Herald.
(The Post News)– On Sunday, the leadership of Austria’s ruling conservatives held a crisis meeting to select a successor for Chancellor Karl Nehammer as he announced his resignation on Saturday, after the attempts to form a coalition government without the far right collapsed.
Reports state that the People’s Party’s (OVP) Secretary General, Christaian Stocker would be Nehammer’s temporaly replacement. These allegations came two hours after the meeting commenced, and the party has still not commented on them.
President Alexander Van der Bellen is left with a few options after the surprise collapse of party talks aimed at forging a central coalition that could have served as a bulwark against the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) right after it came first in September’s parliamentary elections.
Now the most likely options with only limited scope for alternatives or playing for time are that a snap election with support for the euroskeptic, Russia-friendly FPO is still growing or an about-face in which Van der Bellen assigns FPO leader Herbert Kickl with creating a government.
Before the OVP leadership meeting at the chancellor’s office, the governor of Vorarlberg, Markus Wallner, stated that the situation is not easy and believes that they must do everything they can to avoid sliding towards a national crisis. According to Wallner, he claims to have opposed a snap election since that would delay the arrival of a new government by months. OVP governors hold leadership positions.
According to Nehammer, he had insisted that during and after the election campaign that, his party not rule with Kickl as he was too much of an advocate of unproven theories and a security risk but also saying that much of Kickl’s party was trustworthy at the same time.
It is likely that the person to succeed Nehammer will be more open to a coalition with the FPO, which was previously allied with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party. During the September election, the FPO won with about 30% of the vote. Meanwhile, opinion polls have suggested that its support has only grown since then, which then extended its lead over the OVP and Social Democrats to more than 10 percentage points while their support has shrunk.
Currently, the national dynamic is different because should an alliance be formed, that would mean the OVP would be a junior partner to the FPO for the first time, which would then create the OVP leader’s position difficult and undesirable to many.
Following initial reports that high-profile figures, including former party leader Sebastian Kurz—who previously led a coalition government with the FPO and was later convicted of perjury—were being considered for the OVP leadership role, later reports indicated that they were no longer in the running. Which then left lesser-known figures like Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer, who is the new Chamber of Commerce Secretary-General.
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