Austria’s Kurz faces a tricky search for partners

VIENNA: The 33-year-old leader of Austria’s centre-right People’s Party Sebastian Kurz faces the start of a tough search for possible coalition partners

yesterday, despite resounding success in parliamentary elections. His OeVP party won a clear victory with around 37 percent in Sunday’s vote, a marked improvement on its performance in 2017.

The result means Kurz will have the responsibility of sounding out other parties - which may be an uphill task. “We will of course talk to all parties .... to see with which parties we could have a stable government,” Kurz told the national public radio yesterday, adding this could stretch for more than the two months it took him last time to form a pact

with the far-right.

But that government collapsed in May after his junior coalition partner, the anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPOe), was engulfed in the socalled “Ibiza-gate” corruption scandal which led to the resignation of its leader Heinz-Christian Strache. In the week before the vote, the FPOe was hit by further allegations of expenses abuse by Strache and suffered a worse than expected loss, down almost 10 percent from 2017 to around 16 percent, according to projected results.

The OeVP-FPOe alliance - hailed as a model by nationalists across Europe, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban - now seems unlikely to be repeated as FPOe leaders say they would prefer to lick their wounds in opposition. Dejected current FPOe leader Norbert Hofer says steps towards the “reconstruction” of the party will be announced in the coming days, while the influential Strache, who led the party for 14 years, could be expelled if the expenses allegations turn out to be true. —AFP