VIENNA — Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz had once been seen by Europe's conservatives as the bright, young hope for the future.
His rise was remarkable: He was just 24 when he entered government as secretary of state for integration in 2011, becoming the country’s youngest ever foreign minister at 27. Four years later he was chancellor and the youngest head of government in the world.
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But the graft investigation that forced his resignation over the weekend places him at the center of a cabal that embezzled state funds to deceive the public and his own party, all to pave his way to power.
To preserve the ruling coalition — at least for the moment — the country’s foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, was sworn in as chancellor on Monday.
Austrian Chancellor Kurz resigns amid corruption allegations
Kurz’s fall is seen as a major blow to Europe’s conservatives, many of whom saw him as a charismatic role model, packaging hard-line conservative values under a slick, media savvy veneer. It comes at a time when the center-right across Europe is struggling amid scandals and collapsing support, leaving politics increasingly fragmented.
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In France, former president Nicolas Sarkozy has been engulfed by corruption allegations, most recently getting sentenced to a year in prison for illegal campaign funding. The conservative Republicans party he founded is struggling to find its footing ahead of next year’s elections.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are also in crisis, with her beleaguered party successor last week indicating that he also may be ready to step aside after leading the conservative bloc to its worst election result in its history last month.
In the wake of the results, some in the party had called for it to remodel itself more along the lines of Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party: sleeker, younger and more dynamic.
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But then came the dramatic raids on Kurz’s party offices, the Finance Ministry and other locations on Wednesday and the revelation from prosecutors that the chancellor and members of his close circle were accused of spending state funds for “sometimes manipulated surveys … in the interest of a political party and its top management.”
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Kurz has denied all allegations and stepped down three days before facing a no-confidence vote in parliament.
“Perhaps this is the end of the big people’s parties,” said Peter Hajek, a political analyst with Public Opinion Strategies in Vienna. “Since the 70s and 80s, there’s been a long process of voters distancing themselves from these traditional parties,” he said, adding that personality politics around Merkel in Germany and Kurz in Austria may have cushioned the slide.
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Pressure had mounted on Kurz over the past week, as Austrian papers were filled with details of some 300,000 emails and text messages that came to light after the prosecutor’s office filed a 500-page document with the court outlining the case against the chancellor and nine others.
The conversations show that even though Kurz fashioned himself as a selfless politician while foreign minister in 2016 and 2017, he was actually working to undermine his own party’s leadership.
Experts say the messages offer not just rare insights into corruption and efforts to control public opinion, but intraparty backstabbing.
They provide a salacious backdrop to the accusations that Kurz’s allies used federal funds to pay a political researcher to create polls that showed plummeting support for the conservatives’ leader and national vice chancellor, Reinhold Mitterlehner. They are accused of then bribing a media outlet to publish them.
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According to the prosecution, in January 2017 Thomas Schmid, then general secretary at the ministry and now accused of setting up the deal for Kurz, sent messages to a Finance Ministry colleague saying he is thrilled over the “tool” of the falsified polls. He called the paid coverage in the tabloid ？sterreich as a “genius investment.”
“Whoever pays gives the orders,” Schmid writes, followed by “I’m loving it.”
？sterreich, or “Austria” in German, is a daily newspaper distributed free near public transit and supermarkets, and is linked to a 24-hour TV news channel, Oe24, which can keep news in rotation for days. It has denied the accusations.
Two months later, Schmid described a researcher’s polling results, which showed their part just in third place as “the way we want them to be” — setting the stage for Kurz to come to the rescue.
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Kurz, who was ready to take over, replied: “Good poll, good poll :).” A month later, he became the new party boss.
Kurz has bounced back from scandals in the past. In 2019, he became the first post-war chancellor to be ousted in a no-confidence vote in the wake of the so-called Ibiza scandal, which dramatically brought down his government and at the time was a coalition with the far-right.
Seven months later he was back in power after winning elections once more. Even as he loses power for a second time, opposition politicians and experts say he will continue to pull the strings.
“Sebastian Kurz is a chancellor in the shadows,” Pamela Rendi-Wagner, the head of the opposition Social Democrats, said Saturday.
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In his first statement as he was sworn in on Monday, his successor Schallenberg said that it’d be “absurd” not to work closely with his predecessor.
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“I am consciously making one thing clear from the very beginning: I will, naturally, work very closely with Sebastian Kurz, the leader of the new People’s Party, the largest party in parliament, under whom the People’s Party has fought two national elections successfully,” he said.
Kathrin Stainer-H？mmerle, a politics professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Carinthia, still thinks Kurz will be looked to by other conservatives as a model.
“He was the one who promised a ‘new style,’ but we are now seeing that his methods weren’t fair,” she said, adding that his smoothly packaged, pragmatic style which has pandered to the far-right, might still be emulated.
“I am afraid that the biggest lesson will be that chat messages won’t be saved anymore,” she said.
Morris reported from Berlin.
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