The Austrian government, after the October 2017 election, ended up in a coalition government. The OVP Party ended up with 31-percent of the vote (they are right-of-center types). They partnered with the FPO Party (far-right) who had 26-percent of the vote (they were actually in third-place). The Greens did awful (getting around 3-percent of the vote).
In this partnership deal.....the head of the FPO (Heinz-Christian Strache) ended up with the Vice-Chancellor job.
So in the past week.....this video comes out with Strache sitting in a room and offering Austrian government contracts to a Russian investor.
This all led to a crisis meeting, and finally the OVP Party said enough.....letting the coalition dissolve, and ordering up a new national election.
Date? Unknown....but probably by late August.
The hype? A number of German journalists are suggesting that this will bring down the FPO Party entirely, and sweep in the Social Democratic Party (left of center). There is a problem here in that a large number of people who voted for the FPO in the last election.....tend to still be very negative about immigration and asylum.....which the Social Democrats aren't exactly offering anything to attract that 26-percent or any element of that group over. So I'm not really buying much into this story.
An odd part of this approaching election? From the five top parties (there are eleven additional parties out there as well), at least four of the main candidates leading the parties are known.....are led by women. An accident or just luck, or planned out? Unknown.
So lets get back to this video and the corruption scandal. Back in July 2017....several months BEFORE the election, there was a meeting set up in Ibiza, Spain. Strache shows up with a second party associate. They are there to some gal who claims she's the niece of a Russian oligarch. We are left in the dark about this woman posing as the niece, and the name of the Russian oligarch mentioned. She had cameras set up and picked up the entire offer of insider Austrian contracts.
Why didn't she offer the tape before the October 2017 election? No one can explain that.
Why post the tape out now, just prior to the EU election? No one can explain that.
How did she get an invitation relied onto Strache to arrange this meeting....being a virtual unknown to him? No one can explain that.
The fact that one German comedian knew of the tape at least six to eight weeks prior to the public release? Yeah, that's an odd part of this story, and leads one to suspect that various non-Austrians might have been part of the planning on this episode and it was a long-term deal.
So will this election flip the government over to something else? I would suggest three factors at work. First, the NEOS Party (getting 5.3-percent in the 2017 election) is a relatively new party and has had some growth in public recognition. It's possible that they might take two or three points off the SPO folks. Second, there's still hostility brewing in Austrian over immigration.....that hasn't decreased a single bit in the last two years. Third, eventually....someone is going to ask about the fake Russian Oligarch gal, who set her into the game, and why it took two years before the tape appeared in public. This might lead some to ask about the scandal to the scandal.
In an amusing way, this was Russian collusion....faked-up.
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