Guilty Verdict
Former chancellor Sebastian Kurz has been found guilty at first instance of having given false testimony to a parliamentary investigate committee
Servus!
Guilty. That was the ruling—handed down by judge Michael Radasztics of Vienna’s state criminal court shortly after 19:00 on Friday—on whether former chancellor Sebastian Kurz (People’s Party, ÖVP) had given false evidence to a parliamentary committee investigating revelations related to the Ibiza affair in June 2020. Kurz was handed down an eight-month suspended prison sentence. The decision in the case is not final and Kurz has the right to appeal. In an interview with the ORF on Monday, Kurz criticized the case against him as unfair and politically motivated.
Kurz now finds himself the first former chancellor since Fred Sinowatz (Social Democratic Party, SPÖ) in 1991 to have been found guilty of a criminal offense before an Austrian court. Radasztics determined that Kurz did deceive parliament under oath when he intimated he had not played an active role in choosing members of the oversight board at Austria Holding PLC, the state-owned holding company which manages Austria’s public assets. The testimony of Thomas Schmid—the man appointed Austria Holding’s chair who flipped and become a witness for the state—was, to Radasztics, “believable.”
Kurz has indicated he intends to appeal the state court’s ruling, thus initiating a process that will likely drag on through the courts for years. Consider that, after a trial that lasted about three years, former finance minister Karl Heinz Grasser was sentenced to eight years inside on charges of embezzlement, falsifying evidence, and accepting gifts in relation to the BUWOG affair in 2020, and that, as of writing, that decision still isn’t final and Grasser still has the right to appeal. Fighting the Vienna state criminal court’s ruling will be expensive to Kurz—financially and politically.
Following Friday’s verdict, Politico described Kurz’s future political comeback as ‘unlikely,’ and I tend to agree. Since his resignation in November 2021, Kurz has gone on to make a comfortable living in the private sector—including as a consultant in Silicon Valley for libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel—in spite of his difficulties at home. The longer these legal proceedings go on, and the more entrenched he becomes in the private sector, the further away a return to the ‘Kreisky room’ on Ballhausplatz seems. A cybersecurity firm Kurz co-founded in Israel is now purported to be worth $200 million. Who needs politics?
As I outlined in an op-ed for Politico published at the beginning of the month, Kurz is an awkward thing for the ÖVP to deal with. In the span of the last decade, never was the ÖVP more popular than when Kurz was leader. When he took over the ÖVP following a coup in May 2017, the party’s poll ratings shot up nine points overnight. He led them to general election victory in 2017 and an even greater triumph two years later. Following his resignation, the party’s poll numbers dropped nine points. Even though his policy record is rather thin, Kurz was undoubtedly the great campaigner and PR man of his era—the ÖVP’s secret sauce, without which the party looks pallid and tastes rather flat.
The ÖVP’s tack to the right on both socio-economic issues and on immigration simply isn’t working as well anymore, and the party currently finds itself polling second nationally on 22 percent behind the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). Ostensibly, then, the ÖVP needs Kurz, but Kurz—and in particular the political culture he and his inner circle brought into government—is also part of the reason public trust in the ÖVP and politics in general are in the doldrums. Every day Kurz’s legal travails are in the news—and every headline that includes the word ‘guilty’—are a reminder to voters of that most toxic aspect of Kurz’s political legacy, one the ÖVP cannot seem to renounce or rid itself of entirely.
Bis bald!
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Hej Då, Wien!
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