Austria’s far-right Freedom Party received a mandate on Monday to form a new government, which if successful would be the first led by the far-right since World War II.
The Freedom Party, led by Herbert Kickl, won Austria’s parliamentary election in September last year, taking 28.8 percent of the vote and beating outgoing Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer’s conservative Austrian People’s Party into second place.
However, in October, Austrian President Alexander van der Bellen gave Nehammer the first chance to form a new government after Nehammer’s party said it would not go into government with the Freedom Party under Kickl and others refused to work with the Freedom Party at all.
Photo: Reuters
Those efforts to form a governing alliance without the far-right collapsed in the first few days of the new year and Nehammer said on Saturday that he would resign.
The People’s Party then signaled that it might be open to working under Kickl. Van der Bellen said after meeting Kickl for about an hour at the presidential palace on Monday that he had tasked the Freedom Party leader with holding talks with the People’s Party to form a new government.
The far-right and the conservatives have governed together before, but on previous occasions with the Freedom Party as the junior partner. Most recently, they ran Austria from 2017 to 2019 in a government in which Kickl — a 56-year-old with a taste for provocation — served as interior minister. It collapsed in a scandal surrounding the Freedom Party’s leader at the time.
Coalition talks between the far-right and conservatives are not guaranteed to succeed, but there are no longer any other realistic options in the current parliament and polls suggest that a new election soon could strengthen the Freedom Party further.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia was expected to meet Argentine President Javier Milei yesterday on a regional tour to drum up support ahead of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s swearing-in for a third term. Venezuelan authorities have offered a reward of US$100,000 for information leading to the capture of Gonzalez Urrutia, who insists he beat Maduro at the polls in July last year and is recognized by the US as Venezuela’s “president-elect.” The 75-year-old fled to Spain in September after being threatened with arrest by Maduro’s government, but has pledged to return to his country to be sworn in as
RSS