The disgraced former leader of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, Heinz Christian Strache, has announced that he is leaving the party and quitting politics, after a whirlwind of scandals centred around him led to a drubbing in national elections on Sunday.

Speaking to a hastily gathered press conference on Tuesday morning, Mr Strache said that he had been brought down by a “smear campaign” that had been orchestrated in “cowardly anonymity”.

Speculation had been swirling that the Freedom Party were preparing to suspend him in the wake of an election in which they won only 16.2 percent of the vote, a 10 percent drop on their result two years ago.

Two scandals, one shortly before the EU elections in May and another before the snap election last month, caused voters to leave the party in droves and ignited civil war inside the populist party over the future of their once powerful patriarch.

A secretly recorded video, published by German newspapers in May, brought about the premature end of Mr Strache’s career. In the footage, filmed on Ibiza in 2017, he appeared to offer a woman pretending to be the niece of a Russian oligarch state contracts in return for political backing. It remains unclear who filmed the footage, with theories pointing to foreign intelligence services or political rivals inside Austria.