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Austria’s top diplomat Alexander Schallenberg took over as chancellor on Monday as the ruling party tries to emerge from a corruption scandal that cost the job of one of Europe’s youngest leaders.
Sebastian Kurz, a 35-year-old once feted as a “whizz kid”, said late Saturday he was quitting the top job after being implicated in a corruption scandal.
Schallenberg, 52, was sworn in by President Alexander Van der Bellen shortly after 1:00 pm (1100 GMT).
Van der Bellen said the government now had the “great responsibility of restoring trust”.
Kurz’s centre-right People’s Party (OeVP) and their junior Green coalition partners are hoping to move on from the scandal and serve out the rest of their term until 2024.
However, the fallout from last week’s events may continue to reverberate.
On Wednesday prosecutors raided several OeVP-linked locations, including the chancellery and party headquarters, over allegations that between 2016 and 2018 finance ministry resources were used to pay for “partially manipulated opinion polls that served an exclusively party-political interest”.
Prosecutors allege that payments were made to a newspaper in return for publishing these surveys. The offices of the Oesterreich tabloid were also raided on Wednesday as part of the probe.
The offences were allegedly committed to help Kurz, already a government minister at the beginning of the period in question, take over the leadership of the OeVP.
‘Kurz system’
While Kurz initially insisted there was no reason for him to resign – and continues to vehemently protest his innocence – he then reversed course, saying he was putting the country before his own interests.
But many say Kurz bowed to pressure from the Greens and from within his own party.
Kurz’s critics point out he will still be head of the OeVP and will now sit as leader of its…
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Source : france24
