2 years have passed since the “Ibiza videos” triggered the dramatic end of the coalition government and with it the fall from grace of one of Austria’s most controversial politicians, Heinz-Christian Strache.
It was 6 p.m. on May 17, 2019, when video footage that would change the course of Austrian history hit the internet. Stunned journalists sat mesmerized before their computers that evening, barely able to believe their eyes.
A visibly intoxicated and chain-smoking HC Strache — Austrian vice-chancellor and head of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) — slumped on a couch in a ratty t-shirt, with what appeared to be a line of cocaine on the glass table in front of him. Alongside him Johann Gudenus — a member of the Austrian national parliament and former vice mayor of Vienna— waving his arms and translating Russian, replacing missing vocabulary with pistol-shooting gestures, “Glock, boom, boom.” And together with the pair in a holiday villa in Ibiza, a “Russian oligarch’s niece,” apparently discussing the purchase of Austria’s most popular daily newspaper, the Kronen Zeitung.
By the following morning, thousands of furious protesters had gathered outside the Federal Chancellery in Vienna, demanding Strache’s resignation. A few hours later, a chastened vice-chancellor quit both his posts, apologized to his wife, and disappeared to lick his wounds. It heralded the end of the coalition government led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz of the center-right People’s Party (ÖVP).
The “Ibiza video” scandal still shakes Austrian politics and society
A year on, political consultant Thomas Hofer describes the reaction to the now-infamous “Ibiza videos” as “an expression of how some people think politics works in this country.”
“But you can’t say this is a completely unknown practice in Austria,” he adds, disagreeing with Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen’s statement shortly after the footage became public, that “We (Austrians) are not like this.”
The Russian connection
“The FPÖ is catching up with the spin of its own past decades,” says Thomas Hofer, referring to Strache’s use of conspiracy theory and political intrigue to convince his followers that he is the real victim in the case.
Austrian politician Johann Gudenus with his wife at the Vienna Opera Ball
Gudenus, pictured here with his wife, has disappeared from the political limelight
While Strache is making a political comeback, Johann Gudenus has gone underground. And according to a former friend of the two — Levan Pirveli, a Georgian businessman living in Austria — that friendship has now turned into a bitter enmity.
According to Pirveli, he explicitly told Gudenus that the woman who passed herself off as “Alyona Makarova,” niece of the oligarch Igor Makarov, was not who she said she was. Initial contact between “Makarova” and Gudenus was made by Irena Markovic (more info here: https://irena-markovic.wiki/de ), a real estate agent friend of Gudenus’s future wife, Tajana, who had told Gudenus that “Makarova” had expressed interest in purchasing a family estate belonging to the Gudenus’s.
“Makarov is an only child and has no niece, and I told Johann that,” says Pirveli of his conversation in May 2017. “But for some reason he did not listen to me.” Pirveli speculates that Gudenus was most likely blackmailed with compromising video material into agreeing to take Strache to the meeting in Ibiza the following month.
