Stung by criticism over her department’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Austria’s culture minister, Ulrike Lunacek, has resigned after only four-and-half months on the job. Lunacek, a member of the country’s leftwing Greens party and former vice president of the European Parliament, never displayed much interest in the arts or aptitude for the job, critics say.
While restaurants, cafés, bars and churches are reopening across the country, many museums shuttered under measures to combat the pandemic – Austria’s lockdown was one of the strictest in Europe – remain closed, with leaders in the sector bemoaning a lack of financial support and guidance.
Lunacek was out of favour in the Austrian arts community before the health crisis hit, including for her criticism of the controversial decision to award the Nobel prize for literature to Austrian writer Peter Handke – earlier in her career, Lunacek had been the Kosovo rapporteur at the European parliament, so recognition of Handke, a vocal supporter of Serb nationalism, would have galled her – and for having described a Bob Dylan concert as ‘boring’.
In a televised address Lunacek said she was ‘making way for someone else who can hopefully achieve more than I have in this crisis situation’. It’s been a bad few weeks for the politician: last month she was hospitalised with minor injuries after falling from her bicycle in Vienna.
