Austria’s vice-chancellor has resigned after a video appeared to show the far-right politician promising public contracts to a fake Russian backer in return for campaign help.

In a press conference in Vienna on Saturday, the Freedom party (FPO) leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, said he had been the victim of a “political hit-job” aimed at breaking apart Austria’s governing coalition, and insisted the full video would show he had done nothing wrong.

However, he admitted the video showed him “acting like a teenager” and that his behaviour was “stupid, irresponsible and a mistake”. The 49-year-old said he hoped his party could continue governing in a coalition with the centre-right Austrian People’s party (ÖVP) of the chancellor, Sebastian Kurz.

The German weekly Der Spiegel and the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung published the video on their websites on Friday. The papers said the hidden-camera recordings took place in a luxury Ibiza villa in July 2017, months before the parliamentary elections that brought Kurz’s conservative and Strache’s far-right parties to power.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/18/austrian-government-in-crisis-over-secret-strache-footage