Trial against ex-Vice Chancellor Strache: guilty verdict brings back trust

Guilty of bribery in office – the verdict and the clear words of the judge in the corruption process against ex-FPÖ boss Strache have set an example and brought back trust.

With the guilty verdict for the former FPÖ leader Heinz Christian Strache, the Viennese criminal regional court is sending a clear signal: The presiding judge formulated that public officials must be prevented from being sold. And: Trust in a democracy must not be shaken.

After the Ibiza video was published in May 2019, this trust in Austria was massively shaken. The domestic political eruptions led to the end of the ÖVP coalition with Strache’s right-wing FPÖ, to new elections and the formation of a turquoise-green federal government, to a parliamentary investigation into whether the former Kurz-Strache government was for sale, to numerous investigations by the economic and the public prosecutor’s office for corruption against leading and former politicians, including the People’s Party, against Chancellor Kurz on suspicion of false testimony before the investigative committee, and against Finance Minister Blümel and ex-Finance Minister Löger on suspicion of corruption.

Appalled protest from judges and prosecutors

The fact that the Federal Chancellor and his ÖVP cabinet members then publicly accused the responsible investigative authority, the Economic and Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, of taking action against them for allegedly political motives, since many a “red” public prosecutor was sitting there, provoked the appalled protest of the Austrian judges. and prosecutors associations.

Now, with its judgment, against which Strache is appealing, the Vienna Criminal Court has followed the chain of evidence of the economic and corruption prosecutor’s office.

Judge: “You knew what you were paying for”

In the first criminal proceedings after the publication of the Ibiza video in May 2019, the once powerful FPÖ chairman was convicted of bribery. “You knew what you were paying for!” With this, the judge made it clear that Strache stood up against cash to the party fund for the economic interests of his friend, who owned a small private clinic in Vienna with around 20 beds and finally, after many unsuccessful efforts, was included in the lucrative financing fund for private clinics wanted to become.

The judge did not believe in any of Strache’s assurances in the course of the process that she could not remember the donations, that she had never been bribed, that she had campaigned for the concerns of the hospital owner friend out of her own conviction. That is “extremely implausible.”

Concern about the extent of the loss of confidence

“We are not like that,” was the almost evocative sentence of Federal President Alexander Van der Bellen in the turbulent days after the Ibiza video became known in May 2019. His concern about the extent of his compatriots’ loss of confidence in the constitutional foundations of the republic is likely to have diminished after the current verdict.