Austria's vice-chancellor announces resigtion

Vien, May 10: Austria’s conservative Vice Chancellor on Wednesday announced his resigtion from politics, threatening the country’s already fragile coalition government. Reinhold Mitterlehner’s centre-right Austrian People’s Party (öVP) currently shares power with the Alpine tion’s largest party, the centre-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPö), a political marriage that has frayed in recent months. “It’s impossible to do the work of the opposition and the government at the same time,” Mitterlehner lamented, in reference to recent spats between the öVP and the SPö over topics ranging from economic policy and immigration to education reform. Both parties have shared power in a coalition government since 2007, Efe news reported. The conservative leader said there was no sense in carrying on in a government that revolved around political staging and mutual provocation. He went on to deny that he would shoo-in a candidate of his choosing, apparently referring to Sebastian Kurz, the current Foreign Minister who is widely tipped by the local media to take over as leader of the öVP and become vice-chancellor. Speaking on Tuesday, however, Kurz indicated that he did not want to follow that trajectory while the party remained in such a state of division. There has also been widespread speculation that a sp election may be called before the end of 2017, or in early of 2018. (IANS)