MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 21st May, 2019) A corruption scandal in Austria has collapsed the first-in-a-long-time coalition in Western Europe of conservative and far-right parties after a video showed the vice chancellor from the Free Democratic Party (FPO) promise public contracts to a woman posing as a Russian heiress.
Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's deputy Heinz-Christian Strache was filmed during a 2017 sting operation at a rich villa in Ibiza. The woman said she was the niece of a Russian oligarch and had Latvian citizenship.
The latest news is that all FPO ministers in the government have followed Strache out of the coalition, much to Kurz's relief who said recently he had many difficulties with the minority partner in the past, even though he did not always speak about them publicly.
The coalition between Kurz's center-right People's Party (OVP) and the FPO was created in 2017. It was greeted by reports in mainstream media of the "brown plague" engulfing Austria first the first time since World War Two.
For most observers, Kurz stands to win from this scandal because the video served to get rid of a problematic partner. It is likely to reinforce the position of chancellor Kurz in the September elections, whose party immediately distanced itself from the FPO and has remained untarnished.
But even if Kurz comes out as a winner, the alliance of the center-right with the hard-right was shown to be an embarrassing lesson to center-right leaders in Europe, who might be tempted to copy the Austrian coalition.
Strache wrote in an open letter of resignation on Sunday he had experienced a lot of slander and malice in the last 13 years, but what was staged in Ibiza and prepared for two years "has a whole new dimension."
"A dirty campaign of disinformation was launched, which cannot be surpassed in perfidy," he claimed.
Strache said his FPO deputy Johann Gudenus was approached by two "decoys," one of them claiming to be a Latvian lady who said she wanted to move to Vienna with her daughter and sought to invest in Austria.
"It was important, she said, to meet me ... Using illegal means and methods involving video and interception devices, attempts were made to direct Gudenus and myself to criminal offenses or to induce statements that could be of criminal concern, or which deliberately damage us with selected excerpts taken out of context," he added.
He pointed the finger at Israeli consultant Tal Silberstein who was involved in a similar smear campaign against his party during the Austrian Federal election campaign in the fall of 2017.
Silberstein launched a slander campaign against the up and coming candidate Sebastian Kurz, 31 at the time, with Facebook sites spreading fake news about him. It was later discovered that the Socialist party, SPO, had hired Silberstein to do it. The Socialists had to take the blame and crashed at the ballot box.
Pierre Vercauteren, a professor of political sciences at UCLouvain university in Belgium, told Sputnik all center-right parties in Europe could take cue from Kurz and his reaction to the unfolding crisis.
"What happens to the FPOe in Austria can happen tomorrow elsewhere, but it has repercussion in Europe. All center-right parties are looking at Chancellor Kurz's reaction and it could mean a stop to the present tendency of alliances with the hard-right parties, which could stop being seen as an alternative," he said.
The appearance of an alleged Russian heiress is not incidental. Russia has long been the target of EU accusations that it tries to tamper with European votes.
It only stands to reason that the "Mata-hari" type woman who led Strache into the pitfall was "the daughter of a Russian oligarch," according to Nicola Tournay, communications director from Belgium's Popular Party.
"What on earth would be the interest of Russia to attack the FPO?... By the way this woman is from Latvia, in the European Union; she is not from Russia and is not the daughter of an 'oligarch.' This is also a cheap attack on Russia. I hope the investigators will shed light on this sordid manipulation," he said.
He said this revelation of a 2017 video was important because the right-wing are the usual suspect when it comes to political commentators in Europe apportioning the blame for disseminating fake news and manipulating information.
"Here it is clearly the opposite! Who has interest in 'killing' the dream-team coalition of Conservatives (OVP) and FPO that was functioning well in Austria? The Left parties in Austria, starting with the SPO, the Socialists of ex-Chancellor Kern, who were already behind the fake news tarnishing candidate Sebastian Kurz in October 2017," he noted.
The big question is what the authors of the sting video stand to gain from keeping it under wraps for two years. Suspicion is that the video trap was released just a week ahead of the European Parliament election to deflect the votes away from the far-right.
"It is more than obvious that somebody is trying to improperly influence the upcoming elections for the European Parliament ... The scandal is aimed to harm all parties requesting fundamental restructuring of the European Union. Many of them are also in favor of normalizing the relations with Russia. Therefore at least indirectly and probably not as the main objective the scandal is also aimed to impede normalization of relations with Russia," said Roland Hartwig, vice chair of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party's parliamentary group in parliament.
But the effect on the snap elections in Austria this fall should not be underestimated. Hartwig said that a decrease in the number of votes cast for the FPO at the upcoming election was "pretty likely."
"However, in the mid- and long term FPO will recover from this blow as the strong need for fundamental reforms of the European Union will remain and even further grow in the future," he said.
Anton Friesen, a member of the German Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs from the AfD, echoed his concerns.
"I think the video will surely have a huge impact at the upcoming elections. On the other side, the FPO is well established and they can offer solutions of many issues in Austria for the voters. Therefore, I hope the losses will be not so high than some haters of the FPO are hoping for," he told Sputnik.
Following an express poll taken this week-end in Austria, the FPO would lose some 5 percent of its supporters and would go down from 23 percent to 18 percent. This is but an immediate photo of opinion and the September vote is still far away. Things can change and the FPO can regain its status of second party in the country.
