The Socialist Party leadership on Monday strongly suggested President Kurt Waldheim should step down but stopped short of calling for his resignation. Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, party chief Fred Sinowatz and other party leaders also renewed an indirect offer to support a conservative candidate to be nominated for presidential elections if Waldheim quits. The resolution adopted by the Socialist leadership meeting said the report of a historians' commission on Waldheim's service in the German army during World War II had ``badly shaken the president's moral authority at home and abroad.'' It also said that a televised speech by Waldheim on Feb. 15 ``has raised doubts about his ability to integrate'' Austria's opposing political camps. In that speech, Waldheim said he would not step down and dismissed as wrong unspecified parts of the report earlier this month by the international panel of historians that probed his wartime past. Waldheim, 69, has consistently denied any wrongdoing as a first lieutenant serving in the German army in the Balkans during the war. The resolution said the Socialists are ready, together with the conservative People's Party, junior partner in the coalition government, to ``look for a way toward a new beginning in the office of federal president.'' Asked whether this meant that the Socialists would agree to a joint conservative presidential candidate, Sinowatz told reporters ``this certainly includes also the question whether a personnel change is possible.'' Economics Minister Robert Graf and other leading officials of the conservative People's Party last week expressed increasing uneasiness in the party about the damage being done to the country if Waldheim clings to his post. Waldheim, elected in 1986, ends his term in 1992. The historians' commission presented no evidence that would clearly back allegations Waldheim committed atrocities, but it left open the question of whether he was guilty of any crime. It said he was ``in close proximity'' to some Nazi atrocities in the Balkans, knew they were going on and made no attempt ot prevent them. It also said Waldheim concealed his wartime past and tried to make it seem harmless once he could no longer hide it.
