government
Double resignation of ministers in Austria
Austria’s Tourism Minister Elisabeth Köstinger (ÖVP) announced her resignation in a personal statement. Photo: Georg Hochmuth/APA/dpa
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The Austrian government of the conservative ÖVP and the Greens is about to be reshuffled. Two ministers leave the team. That means more fuss.
In Austria, two ministers of the conservative governing party ÖVP announced their resignation on Monday. Agriculture and Tourism Minister Elisabeth Köstinger and Economics Minister Margarete Schramböck surprisingly made their positions available.
Köstinger is considered a confidant of ex-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who withdrew from politics last year in the face of corruption investigations. The 43-year-old said she had already planned her farewell at the time. The ÖVP governs in Vienna together with the Greens.
The ministers announced their resignations five days before a party conference in Graz, at which the current chancellor, Karl Nehammer, also wants to replace Kurz as head of the ÖVP. The larger governing party is under pressure because of various corruption investigations and the current wave of inflation. According to polls from early May, the party under Nehammer fell behind the opposition Social Democrats with only 24 percent. The SPÖ can currently count on 28 percent of the votes.
SPÖ and the right-wing FPÖ are calling for new elections
Nehammer only announced that he wanted to clarify the successor to the two ministers in the coming days. There was initially no reaction from the Greens. The SPÖ and the right-wing FPÖ called for new elections. Köstinger began her political career in the farmers’ association, a sub-organization of the ÖVP. From 2009 to 2017 she sat in the European Parliament. She has been Minister since 2017. Now it’s time to “open a new chapter in my life,” she said.
Economics Minister Schramböck also announced her departure a few hours later, without giving a reason. The former top manager switched from the telecoms industry to politics in 2017. As a minister, Schramböck had to take criticism again and again. In 2020, her ministry launched an online shop directory called “Kaufhaus Österreich”, which cost more than one million euros and caused a lot of ridicule because of its design.