By Francois Murphy
VIENNA (Reuters) - The leader of Austria's far-right Freedom Party criticised President Alexander Van der Bellen's handling of coalition talks on Monday for the first time since the FPO won last month's parliamentary election but fell far short of a majority.
The FPO secured around 29% of votes in the Sept. 29 election. It wants to lead a government, but needs to form a coalition that controls at least half the seats in parliament in order to do so.
Van der Bellen, who oversees the formation of governments, said last week he could not follow the convention of asking the election winner to form a coalition because no party wants to govern with the FPO. He demanded clarity and ordered talks among the three parties who won the most votes.
"The president could simply have provided clarity by tasking the Freedom Party with forming a government as the party with the most votes," FPO leader Herbert Kickl, 55, said in a statement to the media.
"He has himself obfuscated the clarity that exists and thus produced the lack of clarity he is now complaining about."
While Van der Bellen, an 80-year-old former leader of the left-wing Greens, has criticised the FPO and hinted that he would not let Kickl become chancellor, public interactions between the two had been courteous since the election. Last year Kickl called Van der Bellen a "mummy" who was "a bit senile".
Kickl and his counterparts from the conservative People's Party (OVP) and the third-placed Social Democrats (SPO) are due to meet one-on-one this week and report back to Van der Bellen.
The only party to have left the door open to a coalition with the FPO is the OVP but it has repeatedly ruled out joining a government with Kickl in it, and Kickl insists he should be chancellor.
Kickl said there were many points where the FPO and OVP overlap, suggesting they should govern together and warning the OVP again against forming a three-way "coalition of losers" excluding the FPO. The OVP, however, rebuffed his advance.
"We believe he (Kickl) is not fit to govern," OVP Secretary General Christian Stocker told a news conference.