Judicial troubles for the Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, one of the best-known faces of the European rigorist right. According to the Anti-Corruption Prosecution, in 2016 the current head of government in Vienna would have commissioned and falsified some publicly funded surveys and published by the tabloid Austria. The alleged crimes are corruption, aiding and abetting e abuse of office.
Together with the chancellor, several members of his entourage are also under investigation for the same crimes: the spokesmen Johannes Frischmann and Gerald Fleischmann and the councilor Stefan Steiner. Also targeted by the magistrates are Sophie Karmasin, who as an official of the Ministry of Finance allegedly gave Kurz public funds to pay for the rigged polls, and the publishers of Austria, Wolfgang and Helmuth Fellner.
At the material time, five years ago, Kurz was not yet the chancellor-hawk of today, but worked to become one: the seat he occupied was that of Foreign Minister and he was considered by all to be the rising star of the Austrian People's Party.
And right the ambition to reach the top that would be the origin of everything. To discredit the then head of the party, Reinhold Mitterlehner, Kurz allegedly transferred the money received from the finance ministry (1,3 million euros) to the Österreich publishing group through fake ad deals.
According to the Austrian magistrates, the polls at the heart of the scandal "were motivated only by party reasons and were supposed to serve advance Kurz and his closest confidants”. The People's Party rejects all the accusations and speaks of "falsehood", as does the editorial group Austria.
The investigation into Kurz was born almost by chance, while the investigators were analyzing some telephones seized in another investigation, the one on the so-called "Ibizagate". In that case, another exponent of the Austrian right ended up in the storm, Heinz-Christian Strache, filmed while he was genuflecting in front of the alleged scion of a Russian oligarch to ask her for favours. The video, recorded precisely on the Spanish island of Ibiza, put an end to Strache's political career in the bud.
