Austrian vice chancellor steps down amid party infighting

BERLIN – Austria’s vice chancellor announced his resignation on Wednesday amid persistent infighting in his centre-right party, saying that he is also stepping down as its leader.

The country’s chancellor said he regrets Reinhold Mitterlehner’s resignation, but signalled that he hoped to keep the governing coalition alive until an election that is due late next year.

Mitterlehner, who is also Austria’s economy minister, said in a hastily arranged news conference that he would quit all his posts May 15.

Mitterlehner’s Austrian People’s Party is the junior partner in an often bad-tempered “grand coalition” with the centre-left Social Democrats of Chancellor Christian Kern.

The two parties are traditional rivals but have governed Austria together for the past decade, and for much of the time since World War II. Last year, neither party’s candidate made it into the runoff vote for the Austrian presidency.

Austria is due to hold a parliamentary election in the fall of 2018, though there has been long-running speculation that the date might be moved forward. The two governing parties and the anti-immigration Freedom Party are the country’s strongest.

People’s Party leaders are expected to meet over the weekend to choose an interim leader, Mitterlehner said. It wasn’t immediately clear who that will be.

The ambitious foreign minister, 30-year-old Sebastian Kurz, is widely viewed as a likely future leader. However, he recently said he didn’t want to take over the party at this point.

Mitterlehner, the fourth leader of the Austrian People’s Party since it lost the chancellery in 2007, criticized the behaviour of some party members.

“I think it is impossible … to do government work on the one hand and at the same time be our own opposition,” he said.

Kern said that the upcoming “clarification” in the People’s Party “may be an opportunity for Austria and an opportunity for this government.”

“I am convinced that it makes sense to use the more than a year ahead of us to bring about the necessary changes in our country,” he said.