Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz announced on Saturday that he was stepping down from his office to defuse a government crisis triggered by prosecutors’ announcement that he and close team members are a target of a corruption investigation. 

Kurz, speaking in a televised address on Austrian television said, “I want to make space to guarantee stability,” according to Associated Press inputs. Furthermore, he said Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg would become the new chancellor, according to public broadcaster ORF.

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Kurz and his close associates are accused of trying to secure his rise to the leadership of his party and the country with the help of manipulated polls and friendly reports in the media, financed with public money.

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. But Kurz said he will become the head of his conservative Austrian People’s Party’s parliamentary group.

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The Greens’ leader, Vice-Chancellor Werner Kogler, welcomed Kurz’s decision as “a right and important step.”

Talking about the Greens’ demands to replace Kurz, he said: “Many tell me that this is unfair and … you can imagine that I personally would also be grateful if the presumption of innocence in our country really applied to everyone.”

He insisted that the accusations against him were being “mixed up” with old text messages that have surfaced in recent days. “Some of them are messages that I definitely wouldn’t formulate the same way again, but I am only a human being with emotions and also flaws,” he said.

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Meanwhile, Schallenberg has already served as foreign minister in a non-partisan interim government that ran the European Union nation of 8.9 million people for several months after Kurz’s first coalition with the far-right Freedom Party collapsed in 2019.

Austria’s next regular parliamentary election is due in 2024.

With inputs from the Associated Press