The chancellor ends his coalition with the far-right
MANY VISITORS to Ibiza do things they regret. But rarely do they involve dodgy discussions with wealthy Russians over procurement contracts and sales of stakes in newspapers. On May 18th Heinz-Christian Strache , the leader of Austria’s hard-right Freedom Party , resigned as the country’s vice-chancellor after a stunning exposé published overnight by German media suggested that he had been prepared to manipulate the Austrian state to help his party’s fortunes.
During a boozy evening at a rented villa on the Spanish island in July 2017, three months before an Austrian general election, Mr Strache and Johann Gudenus, an ally, met “Alyona Makarova”, a young woman who claimed to be the niece of a Russian oligarch, and a companion. Over champagne, sushi and copious amounts of Red Bull, Mr Strache appears to have offered to help his interlocutor gain access to juicy state highway contracts once he joined the government.
The source of the set-up remains unclear. Whoever was behind it mounted a sophisticated operation, including the courting of Mr Gudenus before the meeting, the installation of cameras and microphones throughout the Ibiza apartment, and, after sitting on the footage for nearly two years, a leak to the German press that was presumably designed to harm Mr Strache in the run-up to next week’s European election.
Mr Strache’s political career is surely over. But Mr Kurz finds himself in a tricky spot. After inviting the FPÖ, a party with a long history of flirtation with neo-Nazism, to join the ÖVP in government in 2017, Mr Kurz promised anxious European allies that he could tame his coalition partner’s more extreme instincts.
The scandal has also troubled Mr Strache’s friends outside Austria. Today Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and the leader of its populist Lega party, held a large rally in Milan, flanked by Marine Le Pen and other avatars of Europe’s nationalist right, as part of a joint campaign for the European elections. A senior politician from the FPÖ had been due to join them, but had to cancel at the last minute.
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