There is no question about whether the Austrian chancellor jumped or was pushed when he announced his resignation on Saturday. His coalition partners the Greens put the knife to Sebastian Kurz’s neck when they have initiated a vote of confidence against the embattled chancellor for Tuesday, which he was almost certainly bound to lose.

A conservative with a minuscule ‘c’ Kurz has managed a curious balance to stay in power by being an unreliable political partner to the dominant European liberal movements, and despite leading a conservative party in name, an equally unreliable partner to conservative governments.

The political chameleon’s will and ability to survive was amply demonstrated by the fact that after his government coalition with the right-wing FPÖ fell apart, without batting an eyelid, he was able to form another one with the radical left-wing Austrian Greens.

Yet, it seems his lust for power has become his undoing, as the revelations that led him to resign showed us a 35-years-old politician who is willing to do almost anything to cling to power.

Snout in the trough Kurz was forced to resign due to corruption and an opinion poll manipulation scandal, in which his party’s (ÖVP) officials have distributed some spun opinion poll results that favoured the chancellor’s party, with the polls financed with public funds. He also offered advertising space to media outlets that agreed to run the questionable data.

Kurz denies any involvement in the affair. Yet whichever way the anti-corruption prosecutor’s investigation will go, some older text messages published in connection with the corruption affair between Kurz and his party officials will do little to enhance his image as the young, idealistic politician that many Austrians were so enthusiastic about.

It will also demolish the saintly image that he nurtured after his withdrawal from the coalition with the FPÖ, distancing himself from the nationalists’ leader Heinz-Christian Strache by snootily declaring ‘I can no longer work with a member of the government who is being investigated by the police.’

The jubilant capitalised on Kurz’s misfortunes by tweeting, ‘If you fail and break by the standard of your own quotes!’

After the defeat of Andrej Babiš in the Czech elections on Saturday, the left-wing European press celebrates the fall of another ‘conservative’ European leader. But these celebrations are founded on wishful thinking.

Kurz was no conservative. He was a foreign minister in the regime of social democrat Werner Faymann. In 2015, amid the peak of the migrant invasion of Europe he called Viktor Orbán a de facto fascist. He compared the Hungarian government’s decision to build a fence to the Nazis. Kurz also nodded enthusiastically after the publication of the now-discredited Sargentini report that portrayed conservative-led Hungary as a dictatorship.

Like the younger Winston Churchill, the snivelling opportunist was a bendy politician able to manoeuvre his personal ideology in any shape that suited his own political ambitions, and wherever opinion polls guided him to pick up extra votes.

He leaves behind virtually no policies or achievements that could positively be described as having a conservative character, only a radical leftist, pro-migration, climate cult-peddling Green party in power.