The Austrian People’s Party is the Western hemisphere’s longest-serving government party, having been in the government as a senior or junior coalition partner continuously since 1987. But having been in government so long had, by the mid-2010s, rendered it a husk: the party seemed more interested in preserving its government positions (and control over lucrative government contracts) than in standing for something. This became particularly apparent with the outbreak of the migrant crisis in 2015, when the supposedly “conservative” party stood by as Austria was flooded with migrants. Voters, seeing this, flocked to the populist-right Freedom Party, and the People’s Party’s numbers crashed. A Freedom Party chancellor seemed imminent.

But then, Sebastian Kurz took the reins of the People’s Party. Kurz had risen like a rocket to the top of Austrian politics, becoming foreign minister at only 27 and party chairman at the age of 30. Kurz had made a name for himself as a fierce critic of mass migration, having played a key role in closing the “Balkan route”, through which millions of migrants had entered central Europe. His rise to the top of the party showed voters that the People’s Party could actually care about something; voters reversed course and dropped the Freedom Party for Kurz’s People’s Party. Kurz was swept into the chancellery in the next elections.

But Kurz wanted to do things differently. He brought his own coterie with him, centralising decision-making authority, and sought fundamentally to remake the party, replacing its old black colour for a bright turquoise, even referring to it as the “New People’s Party”. But in doing so, he was trying to change the way business was done in the party (the “black governors” of the Austrian states had previously held lots of power). Critics called his operations the “House of Kurz”; in the words of one, Kurz had established “a close-knit network of the chancellor’s loyalists in the government, private sector and media who quietly collaborate to their mutual benefit.”