Two months after Sebastian Kurz left the head of the Austrian government, Interior Minister Karl Nehammer was appointed to succeed him on Friday.
Austria has turned a page of Sebastian Kurz, and soon there will be a new prime minister. The Conservative Party appointed Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (Karl Nehammer) as the party leader on Friday, December 3, as the prime minister. The 49-year-old politician announced at the time that he had passed a large-scale cabinet reorganization “in unison” with environmentalists. Since January 2020, environmentalists have been allied with environmentalists.
“Today, I was unanimously appointed by the leadership of ÖVP as the chairman of the party and therefore became a candidate for the post of prime minister,” Carl Nehammer told reporters in Vienna.
“I am very grateful, this is an honor and privilege I didn’t expect,” he continued. “Our goal now is to quickly start discussions with the president,” said Alexander Van der Bellen, who will be responsible for validating the next government.
The appointment date has not yet been determined.
After the thunderbolt, Sebastian Kurz was forced to resign in October after investigating his corruption. But he maintained the leadership of the party until Thursday announcing his withdrawal from political life. Alexander Schallenberg holds a temporary position in the Chancellery and will find his own position in foreign affairs.
“The end of the Kurtz era”
“We are witnessing the end of a process that started in October,” commented political scientist Thomas Hofer. “Sebastian Kurtz initially hoped to return as soon as possible. It is for this reason that the party has sent Alexander Schellenberg, who has never had the ambition to lead the government.”
He went on to say that the situation is “different from Karl Nehammer, he must get his place by placing “new faces” and indirectly break with the Kurz team.
Julia Partheymüller of the University of Vienna said that his arrival in the party “confirmed the end of the Kurz era.”
Karl Nehammer was born in Vienna in 1972, with a three-day beard and gray sideburns. He first worked in the army and was appointed a lieutenant.
As the son-in-law of a star TV host, he then ventured into the field of political communication. He was elected as a deputy in 2017 and appointed as a minister in January 2020. Therefore, he had to manage the first Islamic attack in Austria, which caused four people in November of the same year.
Commentators believe that he is “loyal” to his training, is married and has two children, and he joined the government with little ties to Sebastian Kurz.
He made no compromise on the issue of asylum rights. He was criticized by NGOs for expelling children in the middle of the night, and he hoped to send Afghans back to Kabul when the Taliban came to power.
Return to stability
Sebastian Kurz announced his departure on Thursday. He explained that he wanted to start a “new chapter”, saying that he was “exhausted” by the prosecutor’s allegations that had recently turned into a political scandal.
In October, during the investigation of suspected embezzlement of public funds between 2016 and 2018, several places including the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance were raided. The purpose of the alleged embezzlement of public funds is to fund the publication of false polls and free media coverage of Sebastian Kurz.
Since the news came to light, ÖVP, who has been in power since 1987, has lost first place in the polls: it has been surpassed by the Social Democratic Party. He was even followed by the extreme right.
Julia Partheymüller stated that if someone calls for new elections, “conservatives and their environmental allies insist that stability must be restored”, while the Austrians say they are tired of recurring crises.
In fact, Karl Nehammer will become the fifth prime minister since 2016: Sebastian Kurz then broke the alliance with the left and then aligns with the far right.
Before Sebastian Kurtz returned with the Green Party in early 2020, the nationalists had been swept by corruption scandals and formed an expert government.
Complicating the problem is that due to the violent wave of coronavirus and the vaccination rate being lower than the EU average, Austria is currently being restricted again.
Agence France-Presse