Sebastian Kurz
Sebastian Kurz was the youngest head of government in the world at thirty-one and was gone by thirty-five. He entered politics through the People's Party youth wing, became state secretary for integration at twenty-four, and foreign minister at twenty-seven, having never finished his law degree. The reputation was made in 2015 and 2016, when he pushed to close the Balkan route against the position of Germany and of his own coalition partners, and was proved politically right in that the numbers fell. He took the party in 2017, rebranded it turquoise instead of black, ran it as a personal list, and won. He governed with the far-right Freedom Party until 2019, when a video recorded in Ibiza two years earlier showed its leader offering public contracts to a woman posing as a Russian oligarch's niece; the coalition collapsed within days and he won the election that followed. He was brought down in October 2021 by a different scandal: an investigation into polling that flattered him, paid for with finance ministry money and placed in a newspaper whose owner was said to have been rewarded with advertising. He resigned as chancellor, then left politics entirely, and went to work for Peter Thiel. He was convicted in 2024 of making false statements to a parliamentary committee and given a suspended sentence, and acquitted on appeal in 2025. The party he rebuilt has not won an election since he left it, and the turquoise branding was quietly dropped. He is the clearest European example of a party captured by one person's image: it worked completely while he was there and left nothing behind.
- Lived: 1986 CE – ?
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: head_of_government, politician
