Austria gets new leader who will rule under Kurz’s gaze

Bloomberg

Austria’s new Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg vowed to work closely with his predecessor and future party whip, Sebastian Kurz, who was reduced to a parliamentary role by a corruption scandal.
The new premier, almost two decades older than Kurz, said he’ll continue to work along the lines of a coalition program signed with the Green Party in 2020. That includes a wide-ranging tax overhaul that puts a price on carbon-dioxide pollution, he said after his inauguration on Monday.
Schallenberg, who has been serving as foreign minister, will need to pick up the pieces from the Kurz era and answer questions over whether it is really over. In his first comments after his appointment, the chancellor didn’t totally dispel the notion that the wily 35-year-old political survivor will be allowed to keep pulling the strings from the sidelines.

“I will of course work work very closely with Sebastian Kurz” as head of the People’s Party parliamentary group, Schallenberg said after his appointment. “Anything else in a democracy would be absurd.”

Kurz pledged an orderly handover of power before his swearing in as lawmaker, scheduled for Thursday.

“One thing is clear: I am not a shadow chancellor,” Kurz said in a statement Monday.

Events had caught up with Kurz by the weekend. On Friday he was resisting pressure from his junior partner, the Greens, to quit after prosecutors raided offices in the Chancellery as part of a bribery investigation. But the chorus of critics kept growing, and he was facing a vote of non-confidence Tuesday.

By Saturday evening, Kurz hastily summoned the media to announce he would step aside in favor of the man he hand-picked to represent Austria’s foreign policy in his second government.

By departing largely on his own terms, Kurz is trying to stay a step ahead. Most of the key allies who helped his rise to the top will remain in government as he tries to clear himself of potential criminal charges in at least two separate investigations.