By Francois Murphy
VIENNA (Reuters) – The leadership of Austria’s ruling conservatives held a crisis meeting on Sunday to pick a successor to Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who announced his resignation on Saturday as attempts to form a coalition government without the far right fell apart.
The surprise collapse of three- and then two-party talks aimed at cobbling together a centrist coalition that could serve as a bulwark against the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) after the FPO came first in September’s parliamentary election leaves President Alexander Van der Bellen with few options.
A snap election with support for the eurosceptic, Russia-friendly FPO still growing or an about-face in which Van der Bellen tasks FPO leader Herbert Kickl with forming a government are now the most likely options, with only limited scope for alternatives or playing for time.
“It is not an easy situation,” Markus Wallner, the governor of Vorarlberg, the westernmost of Austria’s nine provinces, told reporters before the People’s Party (OVP) leadership meeting at the chancellor’s office.
“I believe we must do everything we can now to avoid sliding towards a national crisis.”
Wallner said he opposed a snap election since that would delay the arrival of a new government by months. OVP governors are part of the leadership.
Nehammer insisted during and after the election campaign that his party would not govern with Kickl because he was too much of a conspiracy theorist and posed a security risk while at the same time saying much of Kickl’s party was trustworthy.
Nehammer’s departure makes it likely that whoever succeeds him will be more open to a coalition with the FPO, which is formally allied with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party.
GROWING SUPPORT FOR FPO
The FPO won September’s election with around 29% of the vote, and opinion polls suggest its support has only grown since then, extending its lead over the OVP and Social Democrats to more than 10 percentage points while their support has shrunk.
The OVP and FPO overlap on various issues, particularly taking a tough line on immigration, to the point that the FPO has accused the OVP of stealing its ideas.
The two governed together from late 2017 until 2019, when a video-sting scandal involving the then-leader of the FPO prompted their coalition’s collapse. At the state level, they govern together in five of nine states, including in OVP moderate Wallner’s Vorarlberg.
The national dynamic is now different because if they were to form an alliance the OVP would for the first time be junior partner to the FPO, making the position of OVP leader difficult and undesirable to many.
After initial media reports that household names like former party leader Sebastian Kurz, who led the last coalition with the FPO and has since been convicted of perjury, could become OVP leader, Austrian media reported overnight that they were no longer in the running.
That left lesser-known figures such as new Chamber of Commerce Secretary-General Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer, 45.
Meanwhile, the FPO hammered home its message.
“Austria needs a Chancellor Kickl now,” it said on X.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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