Kurz made his candidacy conditional on an overhaul of his party’s selection processes, with Sunday’s ballot listing his name next to the “New People’s party”. Stephan Schulmeister, an economist who advised the last ÖVP chancellor, Wolfgang Schüssel, argued that Kurz’s economic manifesto was almost identical to that of the FPÖ. “With Kurz’s takeover of the Austrian People’s party, the cordon sanitaire between the two centre parties and the rightwing populists has finally fallen away,” he told the Guardian. Kurz’s supporters, however, praise him for having developed an entirely new strategy for coping with an aggressive and media-savvy nationalist right. But it can also make political parties rigid environments, in which membership of the right chamber of commerce can be more important than talent or imagination.

Source: The Guardian October 15, 2017 12:18 UTC