Friday 15 / November / 2024
Vienna: Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann resigned on Monday, bowing to a revolt from inside his Social Democratic Party after it suffered humiliating electoral defeat by a resurgent far right.
Faymann, chancellor since December 2008, paid the price for a series of election losses by his SPO party and its coalition partner, the conservative People's Party, while the anti-immigration, far-right Freedom Party (FPO) made gains.
After a first-round vote in a presidential election two weeks ago in which the FPO achieved a record score to the embarrassment of the coalition partners, opposition within the Social Democratic Party (SPO) grew into open revolt.
"Do I have full cover... strong support within the party? I must say the answer is no," Faymann said in a statement on Monday.
"I draw the consequences from this low level of support and step down from my positions as party leader and federal chancellor," he added, without specifying when the decision would take effect.
Conservative Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mittelehner will take over in an interim capacity, a spokeswoman for Austrian President Heinz Fischer said. Mitterlehner also said he saw no need for a snap election, news agency APA reported.
Faymann, renowned as a political survivor, was booed at a party rally on May Day, with opponents in the crowd holding up placards saying "Resign!"
The party's leadership is due to meet on Monday afternoon to decide on a future course, which could have included replacing Faymann.
He had come under pressure from some in his party over his policy of tighter restrictions on immigration and asylum-seekers - something partly undertaken to counter the rise of the anti-immigration and eurosceptic FPO.
But he had also drawn criticism for keeping up a ban on forming coalitions with the FPO, which is leading opinion polls.
The SPO and People's Party (OVP) scraped together just 23 per cent combined last month in the first round of the election for the largely ceremonial post of president.
The FPO candidate, with an anti-immigration platform, won more than a third of the votes, sending him into a run-off with a former Green Party leader on May 22.
The FPO regularly attracts more than 30 per cent in opinion polls, well ahead of the two ruling parties which have dominated postwar politics in Austria, putting the centrists under pressure to cooperate more closely with the FPO in future.
The next parliamentary elections are due to be held by 2018.
A spokeswoman for Faymann, 56, said she did not know what would happen to the coalition government. The head of the OVP, Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner, said in a statement his party's leadership would meet on Tuesday.
Austria took in around 90,000 asylum seekers in 2015 after large numbers of migrants, many fleeing conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, arrived in this country of 8.5 million people.
