Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz triggered a general election on Saturday after the release of a video that showed his far-right coalition partner seeking to trade public contracts for campaign donations
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"Enough is enough," Kurz said in a brief statement, in which he described the many challenges he faced in recent months in dealing with the far-right Freedom Party, which despite its alignment with the chancellor's center-right People's Party on policy issues remained a lightning rod for controversy.
Kurz said that given his ideological differences with Austria's other parties and the Freedom Party's crisis, he had asked the country's president, Alexander Van der Bellen to call a new election, which is expected to be held in the fall. The decision will reverberate across Europe, where the Austrian coalition was seen as a test case for the viability of the far right to govern alongside more mainstream parties.
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