Knives out among Austria’s far-right after poll rout

Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPOe) was grappling Tuesday with the fallout from heavy losses in Sunday’s elections and intensifying corruption scandals hanging over the party.

The man at the centre of those scandals, disgraced former vice-chancellor and FPOe leader Heinz-Christian Strache, announced Tuesday “a total withdrawal from politics and public life” -- but this may not be enough to stem the instability at the heart of the party.

Strache, who led the FPOe for 14 years, was forced to quit all his posts in May over the so-called “Ibiza-gate” tapes, which showed him appearing to offer public contracts to a woman he believed was a Russian oligarch’s niece in return for campaign help.

That affair put an end to the FPOe’s coalition with the centre-right People’s Party (OeVP) of Sebastian Kurz.

In the days leading up to the election, another scandal broke, this time involving Strache’s alleged misuse of party money.

All this led to a stinging rebuke from voters, who sent the FPOe plummeting to 16 percent, down almost 10 points from their 2017 results.

Strache said on Tuesday that he was suspending his membership of the party and was leaving politics in order to “avoid at all costs an ordeal or any splits within the FPOe”.

Strache’s announcement is seen as an attempt to pre-empt a meeting of the FPOe’s national executive due later on Tuesday called to discuss the crises afflicting the party, and which may take steps to throw Strache out altogether.

Prosecutors confirmed Thursday they were investigating Strache’s expenses and had questioned his former bodyguard and his former office manager “on the suspicion... of submitting fake receipts” costing the party more than 5,000 euros ($5,500).

In the immediate aftermath of “Ibiza-gate”, the party closed ranks around Strache, but the knives have been out for him after Sunday’s poll debacle.

Strache again on Tuesday vehemently protested his innocence and insisted that he had been the victim of a shadowy conspiracy.

The party had also enthusiastically echoed this idea but recriminations are now rising over the wisdom of this strategy.

“The problem is home-made,” the leader of the FPOe in the Tyrol region, Markus Abwerzger, told Oe1 radio.

“It’s not some foreign intelligence agency or the media who have got us into this situation but we ourselves.” In his view it was the expenses scandal that did the most electoral damage, he added.

Some had speculated that Strache would split off from the FPOe to form his own party. Even if that threat now seems to have receded, the various investigations targeting him may yet bring months of embarrassing headlines for the party.

In addition, the Strache family name may not disappear from the corridors of power entirely. His wife Philippa -- who according to Austria media is also accused to have benefited from the alleged misuse of party funds -- is still in the running for one of the FPOe’s parliamentary seats.

Watching the rows on the far-right with some trepidation will be the winner of Sunday’s election, OeVP leader Kurz.

He needs to find coalition partners to secure a majority in parliament and had made it clear before the election that he would be open to working with the FPOe again. However, this option may now be off the table for the foreseeable future.

“In future Kurz will have to take into account the instability in the FPOe, which will make it very difficult for him to fulfil his ambition to govern in a stable way over the next five years,” political analyst Thomas Hofer told AFP.

Several prominent FPOe figures have said the priority for the party must now be to head into opposition and carry out internal reforms.

Late Monday updated results from Sunday’s election were issued including postal votes. They put the OeVP on 37.5 percent, the FPOe on 16.2 percent, the centre-left Social Democrats on 21.2 percent, the Greens on 13.8 percent and the liberal Neos party on eight percent.