Sebastian Kurz, who served as Austria’s chancellor from 2017 to 2019, after which from 2020 to October of this yr, has introduced his departure from the world of politics.
Sebastian Kurz is presently serving because the chairman and parliamentary chief of the Austrian Folks’s Occasion. On October 9, he introduced his resolution to vacate the chancellor’s workplace amid an ongoing corruption investigation, marking the top of his second time period in energy, which began in January 2020 after the conservative Folks’s Occasion and the Inexperienced Occasion sealed a coalition deal.
Learn extra
Austria’s Sebastian Kurz steps down as chancellor amid new corruption scandal
Kurz’s departure got here exhausting on the heels of Austria’s prosecutor’s workplace for financial crimes and corruption asserting a probe was underway into the then-chancellor and quite a lot of his shut associates. They’re suspected of manipulating opinion polls and utilizing public cash to safe favorable protection of Kurz’s insurance policies within the media between 2016 and 2018, with the purpose of bettering his possibilities of being elected because the occasion’s chief, and subsequently, chancellor. He has constantly denied any wrongdoing and was solely compelled to step down after his coalition companions from the Inexperienced Occasion issued an ultimatum.
Sebastian Kurz’s first time period in energy additionally ended on account of a corruption scandal, when Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel introduced the ‘Ibiza Affair’ to gentle in Might 2019. It revolved round a video secretly filmed at a personal villa in Ibiza in the summertime of 2017, which featured Kurz’s coalition companions on the time, the management of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Occasion, speaking with a girl who was posing as a relative of a Russian oligarch. The politicians apparently agreed to the Russian oligarch’s phony niece’s gives of economic and media assist forward of the 2017 election in Austria, in alternate for presidency contracts within the nation.
Within the wake of the scandal, the Austrian Freedom Occasion’s management stepped down, and the coalition authorities collapsed; nonetheless, the folks within the video insisted that they had been arrange, accusing the German newspapers of selectively enhancing the video.
As chancellor, Sebastian Kurz took a tricky stance on immigration, and spoke in favor of dialogue with Russia.
