After hours of chanting and whistling, thousands of demonstrators on Saturday cheered the collapse of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s government over a corruption scandal and the prospect of fresh electio<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Kurz\n must go” cried the crowd that had built up in Vienna’s historic first \ndistrict from late morning. As the news of fresh elections came through \non demonstrators’ smartphones later, loud cheers erupted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Expressing\n a widespread view that Kurz had too often excused the scandals of his \ncoalition partner, the far-right Freedom Party led by Heinz-Christian \nStrache, social education worker Andreas Hallas said the vote was “an \nabsolute necessity”.”Anything else would have been an absolute \ncatastrophe, politically,” said Hallas, adding he hoped for a new \ngovernment without the FPOe and Kurz’s centre-right People’s Party .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hallas\n is among those who has been turning up for anti-govermnent \ndemonstrations held come rain or shine every Thursday for more than six \nmonths. But as 61-year-old Elvira Raffinger pointed out, “Today is a \nspontaneous gathering and that’s rare for Austria”, a country where \nstreet politics is not the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In hidden-camera recordings \npublished by German media Friday, Strache was seen promising public \ncontracts in return for campaign help to a fake Russian backer over a \nboozy dinner in a villa on the resort island of Ibiza. Isaac Heimbach, a\n 24-year-old biology student, said he thought the video was “just the \ntip of the iceberg, just a look behind the curtain” of the far-right \nleadership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I hope that this will open the eyes of Austrians who\n voted for the right,” he said as protesters around him waved banners \nthat read “Now it’s over Mr Kurz”, “You all shame this country”, as well\n as “No place for the corrupt and power-hungry in Austria. All resign”. \nIsabella Sedlak who works in Berlin said she had come to the chancellery\n to take part in “this exceptional moment”.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After hours of chanting and whistling, thousands of demonstrators on Saturday cheered the collapse of Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz’s government over a corruption scandal and the prospect of fresh electio “Kurz must go” cried the crowd that had built up in Vienna’s historic first district from late morning. As the news of fresh elections came […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61624,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61625,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61623\/revisions\/61625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}