Austrian Chancellor Kurz resigns after pressure triggers by corruption scandal

Austria's Chancellor Sebastian Kurz has stepped down, after pressure triggered by a corruption scandal. He has proposed foreign minister Alexander Schallenberg as his replacement.

A political crisis was sparked on Wednesday when police raided government offices and the party headquarters, with state prosecutors naming Kurz and nine others as suspects in an anti-corruption probe.

He and his close associates are accused, “with different levels of involvement”, of a plot between 2016 and 2018 to use public money as a bribe to ensure favourable media coverage and “finance partially manipulated opinion polls that served an exclusively party political interest”.

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However, the 35-year-old Chancellor said the corruption allegations against him were "wrong" and denied that he had used government money for political purposes.

The corruption allegations against Kurz have caused a crisis in the Austrian government. Before Kurz's resignation Saturday, opposition parties had threatened to bring a vote of no confidence against him in parliament on Tuesday.

Elected to the chancellorship in 2017, Kurz shrewdly turned one of Europe's biggest crises -- the refugee influx of 2015 -- into a vote-winner at the ballot box.

(With inputs from AFP)