We don’t hold our right wing leaders accountable for breaking the law here in America because it might make someone mad. But it’s good to see that other countries still have some standards:
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz resigned Saturday evening after becoming embroiled in a corruption scandal.
He said he will hand over the chancellery to Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.
Austrian authorities raided Kurz’s offices and party headquarters in Vienna on Wednesday amid suspicion that he and his inner circle conspired to embezzle public funds to bribe pollsters and prominent media figures in return for favorable coverage.
The raids marked a significant escalation of prosecutors’ corruption probe into Kurz, who already faces possible indictment in a separate case involving perjury allegations related to sworn testimony he gave before a parliamentary inquiry last year.
This guy is one of the worst of the far-right European leaders. Young, good looking and a total fascist. Apparently, he couldn’t keep his hands out of the till and foolishly lied under oath.
Update — Oh look, another anti-immigrant, “populist” billionaire is ousted over corruption. Turned out he was stealing hand over fist too even as he promised to “drain the swamp.”
In a shock result, billionaire Andrej Babis’ party has narrowly lost the Czech Republic’s parliamentary election days after the populist leader had to contend with revelations from the Pandora Papers, the biggest offshore data leak in history.
Babis’ centrist party ANO (Czech for “Yes”) was defeated by a center-right opposition group. Voting in the tight race began days after Babis faced investigations and public questioning over Pandora Papers reporting that he used offshore companies to buy a luxury French Riviera estate.
The prime minister, whose turbulent term was marked by criticism of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and claims that he had tended to his own business interests, sought to discredit the revelations as part of a domestic political smear campaign.