MADRID 3 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The centrist party The New Austria and Liberal Forum (Neos, for its acronym in German) has announced this Friday by surprise its withdrawal from the talks for the formation of a coalition government in Austria with the conservative People’s Party (OVP) and the Party Social Democrat (SPO) in the face of what it perceives as a lack of commitment from its interlocutors on budgetary and economic competitiveness issues.
In a speech published on the party’s social networks, its leader, Beate Meinl-Reisinger, lamented that the conversations of these weeks have not yielded “any relevant progress, but rather much more regression” in the conversations, hence there informed this morning both the chancellor, Karl Nehammer, and the SPO leader, Andreas Babler, and the federal president, Alexander Van der Bellen, that negotiations for a tripartite coalition would not continue.
“They have no will to think beyond the day after the elections, and thus it is impossible to create a common vision for Austria 20 years from now,” Meinl-Reisinger lamented before lamenting the “budget hole” that exists right now and the absence of consensus when it comes to covering it.
It should be remembered that these conversations occur at an extraordinary political moment, taking into account that the winner of the September legislative elections was the far-right Freedom Party (FPO), a formation around which the rest of the major parties have formed a “cordon sanitaire.”
In one of the first reactions of the negotiating parties, the general secretary of the Austrian Popular Party, Christian Stocker, has pointed to “retrograde forces” within the Social Democratic Party as partially responsible for the collapse of the talks.
“Although some sectors of social democracy have been constructive, in recent days the retrograde forces within the SPÖ have gained the upper hand,” lamented the general secretary of the ÖVP, Christian Stocker, in a statement carried by Austrian public radio and television ORF. .