Austria’s Greens on Saturday overwhelmingly backed forming a national government with Sebastian Kurz’s conservatives, the first such alliance between the two parties in the country’s history.
The vote at a party conference in Salzburg clears the way for the new government to be sworn in on Tuesday, giving the 33-year-old Kurz his second stint as chancellor.
More than 90 percent of the 270 delegates at the conference backed the coalition deal, according to the Wiener Zeitung newspaper, in which Greens would be in charge of climate issues. But for some, it wasn’t an easy decision: Kurz’s Austrian People’s Party will maintain control of asylum and migration, an area of profound disagreement between the two partners.
Kurz’s party won more than 37 percent of the vote in September’s general election. His former coalition partner, the far-right Freedom Party, suffered heavy losses after video emerged of its then-leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, offering to sell public contracts for campaign support.
The Greens, recovering from a collapse in the previous election, took 13.9 percent of the vote in September’s poll.