The management of Austria’s ruling conservatives held a disaster assembly on Sunday to select a successor to Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who introduced his resignation on Saturday as makes an attempt to type a coalition authorities with out the far proper fell aside.
More than two hours after the assembly started, a number of Austrian media reported that People’s Party (OVP) Secretary-General Christian Stocker, 64, would take over as celebration chief in an interim capability. There was no quick remark from the celebration.
The shock collapse of three after which two-party talks geared toward cobbling collectively a centrist coalition that would function a bulwark towards the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) after the FPO got here first in September’s parliamentary election leaves President Alexander Van der Bellen with few choices.
A snap election with help for the euroskeptic, Russia-friendly FPO nonetheless rising or an about-face during which Van der Bellen duties FPO chief Herbert Kickl with forming a authorities are actually the most definitely choices, with solely restricted scope for options or enjoying for time.
“It just isn’t a simple state of affairs,” Markus Wallner, the governor of Vorarlberg, the westernmost of Austria’s 9 provinces, informed reporters earlier than the OVP management assembly on the chancellor’s workplace.
“I imagine we should do all the things we are able to now to keep away from sliding in the direction of a nationwide disaster.”
Wallner mentioned he opposed a snap election since that might delay the arrival of a brand new authorities by months. OVP governors are a part of the management.
Nehammer insisted throughout and after the election marketing campaign that his celebration wouldn’t govern with Kickl as a result of he was an excessive amount of of a conspiracy theorist and posed a safety danger whereas on the similar time saying a lot of Kickl’s celebration was reliable.
Nehammer’s departure makes it seemingly that whoever succeeds him might be extra open to a coalition with the FPO, which is formally allied with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz celebration.
The FPO received September’s election with round 29% of the vote, and opinion polls counsel its help has solely grown since then, extending its lead over the OVP and Social Democrats to greater than 10 proportion factors whereas their help has shrunk.
The OVP and FPO overlap on varied points, significantly taking a troublesome line on immigration, to the purpose that the FPO has accused the OVP of stealing its concepts.
The two ruled collectively from late 2017 till 2019, when a video-sting scandal involving the then-leader of the FPO prompted their coalition’s collapse. At the state stage, they govern collectively in 5 of 9 states, together with in OVP average Wallner’s Vorarlberg.
The nationwide dynamic is now totally different as a result of in the event that they had been to type an alliance the OVP would for the primary time be junior accomplice to the FPO, making the place of OVP chief troublesome and undesirable to many.
After preliminary media experiences that family names like former celebration chief Sebastian Kurz, who led the final coalition with the FPO and has since been convicted of perjury, might turn out to be OVP chief, Austrian media reported in a single day that they had been not within the operating.
That left lesser-known figures similar to new Chamber of Commerce Secretary-General Wolfgang Hattmannsdorfer, 45.
Meanwhile, the FPO hammered house its message.
“Austria wants a Chancellor Kickl now,” it mentioned on X.