Conservative Amnesia

Center-right parties in Europe have forgotten how to be conservative, argues Jan-Werner Mueller, at Foreign Policy, "Europe Forgot What ‘Conservative’ Means":

Whether or not to adapt to right-wing populism constitutes the major strategic dilemma for Europe’s center-right today, writes Jan-Werner Mueller. https://t.co/2hYxTYgKKd

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) March 21, 2018

Conventional wisdom has it that Europe’s social democrats are in terminal decline. In recent elections in Italy, Germany, and France, once proud left-wing mass parties have been reduced to at best getting a fifth of the vote. The obvious flip side of the mainstream left’s decline seems to be that populists but also the center-right are faring well. In fact, this picture is highly misleading. Center-right parties — European Christian democrats above all — face a real crisis. It is increasingly unclear what they stand for, and, unlike social democrats, they are in real danger of being replaced by the populist right.

Social democrats have been struggling because the “Third Way” pursued by leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder during the late 1990s left them with an enormous credibility problem. They had not just tolerated but actively furthered finance capitalism; deregulation and increasing inequality happened under the watch of nominally left-wing governments, which today are perceived as having betrayed socialist ideals. But, importantly, it is not really in doubt what these ideals are. As the surprise success of Jeremy Corbyn in last year’s British general elections demonstrated, the left can still do remarkably well, under two conditions: Social democrats have to restore their credibility and reorient public attention away from the one issue that is most likely to split its core constituency — immigration. Whether one likes Corbyn’s ideas or not, it is remarkable that a grassroots movement, Momentum, largely captured the Labour Party and effectively erased its toxic association with the widely discredited Blairism.

In somewhat similar fashion, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been trying to assert an agenda offering better protection for workers and more accessible health care. While this month’s decision to re-enter a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats has temporarily obscured this reorientation, the SPD will likely continue to sharpen its profile as a distinctively left-wing party in government.

If one asks, by contrast, what exactly Europe’s center-right stands for today, most citizens will be unable to articulate an answer. This has partly to do with historical amnesia — including forgetfulness on the part of center-right leaders themselves. After World War II, Christian democrats dominated politics in Germany, Italy, and, to a lesser extent, France. The circumstances were uniquely favorable for such moderate center-right parties, which claimed a religious, though nonsectarian, inspiration. Fascism had discredited the nationalist right; the horrors of the midcentury made many Europeans look for moral certainty in religion; and in the context of the Cold War, Christian democrats presented themselves as quintessentially anti-communist actors. Not least, they suggested that there was an affinity between the materialism of classical liberalism on the one hand and communism on the other — and that they were the only parties that clearly rejected both in favor of communitarian values. It is virtually forgotten today that Christian democratic parties had strong progressive elements — even if one occasionally gets a glimpse of that past: Matteo Renzi, who resigned as leader of Italy’s major left-wing party this month, had actually started his political life as a Christian Democrat.

Above all, Christian democrats were the original architects of European integration. They deeply distrusted the nation-state; the fact that, in the 19th century, both the newly unified Italy and the Germany united by Otto von Bismarck had waged prolonged culture wars against Catholics was seared in their collective memory. European integration also chimed with a distinct Christian democratic approach to politics in general: the imperative to mediate among distinct identities and interests. Ultimately, this quest for compromise among different groups (and, in Europe, states) went back to Pope Leo XIII’s idea — directed against rising socialist parties — that capital and labor could work together for the benefit of all in a harmonious society. Christian democracy had been a creation to avoid both culture war and class conflict.

Little is left of these legacies today. Christian democrats and other center-right parties continue to be pragmatists, but it is often unclear what, other than the imperative to preserve power, animates them in the first place. The European Union’s three main presidents — of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council — are all Christian democrats. Yet none of them has advanced a bold vision for the union as a whole. All seem to take it for granted that citizens are wary of further integration. To be sure, this is the narrative right-wing populists push, but evidence from surveys is far more ambiguous.

Whether or not to adapt to right-wing populism constitutes the major strategic dilemma for Europe’s center-right today...

Actually, Christian Democrats today --- think Angela Merkel --- are basically leftists. Yeah, they better learn how to be conservative again, or be relegated to the dustbin of history. They need to conserve their own societies, for one thing. Sheesh.

But keep reading.

Sebastian Kurz's People's Party Wins Parliamentary Elections in Austria - UPDATED!

At the Guardian U.K., "Conservative Sebastian Kurz on track to become Austria’s next leader: Centre of political gravity shifts right as projections put 31-year-old Kurz’s Austrian People’s party ahead in election with 31.7%."

And at WaPo, "Austria turns sharply to the right in an election shaped by immigration":

Early exit polls of Austria's Oct. 15 election, suggest Sebastian Kurz, will take his party into a very narrow majority — positioning himself as the next chancellor. The 31-year old conservative is known for his pledge to take the country into a more hard line stance against the influx of refugees and migrants.

BERLIN — Austria became the latest European country to take a sharp turn right on Sunday, with the conservative People’s Party riding a hard-line position on immigration to victory in national elections and likely to form a government with a nationalist party that has long advocated for an even tougher stance.

The result puts the 31-year-old foreign minister and People’s Party leader, Sebastian Kurz, in line to become Austria’s next chancellor after a campaign in which he emphasized the need to strengthen border controls, reduce caps on refugees and slash benefits for newcomers.

Much of Kurz’s rhetoric echoed positions long held by the Freedom Party, which for decades has anchored the far right of politics in this nation of 8.7 million.

With nearly all results counted as of Monday morning, the Freedom Party was in second place at 27.4 percent, with the ruling Social Democrats trailing close behind at 26.7 percent. The People’s Party was the decisive winner, at 31.6 percent.

“I’ll fight with all my strength for change in this country,” Kurz told cheering supporters — many clad in turquoise, the color he adopted to signal a new era for the People’s Party after decades of identification with black. “There’s a lot to do.”

Two years after Austria was among the more welcoming nations in Europe for refugees fleeing en masse across the continent, the results revealed just how sour public sentiment has turned. Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war, oppression and poverty passed through the central European nation on their way to destinations farther north and west in late 2015 and early 2016. Tens of thousands stayed in the country and applied for asylum protection.

“Austrians are fearful because of immigration and the refugee crisis,” said Reinhard Heinisch, a political scientist at the University of Salzburg. “Kurz addressed these fears, and played with these fears.”

As in other elections across Europe this year, the far right made significant progress, but not enough to triumph.

In France this spring, National Front leader Marine Le Pen made it to the final round of the presidential election. Just last month, the Alternative for Germany Party took 13 percent of the vote — putting a far-right party in the German Parliament for the first time in more than half a century.

But unlike in those nations, in Austria the far right is expected to become part of the government. Kurz will need a coalition partner to form a majority in the parliament, and the Freedom Party is considered the most likely option.

If he goes that route, it would end a “grand coalition” between Austria’s center left and center right that has led the country for the past decade, and for much of its modern history.

Some on Sunday called on Kurz to avoid teaming up with the Freedom Party...

A lot of good that'll do. Kurz himself is a former neo-Nazi, according to Sunday's report at the New York Times. I don't care for anyone with that kind of background and I denounce them. But I think it's just deserts for the radical left, who opened up Europe to the Muslim invasion, and thus opened up the European democracies to a resurgence of nativist, even racist, political parties.

More.

UPDATE: Correction, it's not Kurz who belonged to neo-Nazi groups previously, but Heinz-Christian Strache, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, which came in second in Sunday's election and is likely to enter the government in a coalition with Kurz's People's Party.

After #LondonBridge Jihad, Security Debate Sharpens in British General Election (VIDEO)

I guess the polls are tightening, and it's possible Britain could have a hung parliament after tomorrow's election.

Whatever happens, Islamic jihad should be the top priority, but as always, expect nothing to change. Indeed, if Corbyn's able to win, expect things to get worse. Much worse.

But see the Telegraph U.K., "FINAL DAY OF CAMPAIGNING: General Election 2017 Tories on course for majority of 100 after latest forecast - the eight charts that show how Britain will vote."

And at the Los Angeles Times, "With British election looming, security debate sharpens as two bridge attackers publicly named":

Three days before a British general election in which security concerns have surged to the fore, Scotland Yard acknowledged Monday that the extremist Islamist views of one of three slain attackers who carried out a weekend terrorist strike had been known to investigators.

On the first weekday after the ramming-and-stabbing attack on and near London Bridge that killed seven people and injured dozens more, Londoners and visitors held a moment of silence amid a solemn vigil on the banks of the Thames — but they also resumed their workaday routines.

Commuters streamed on foot past police barricades and heaps of memorial bouquets. The bridge itself reopened, though some streets near the attack scene remained closed off.

Police for the first time publicly identified two of the three dead attackers — Pakistan-born Khuram Shazad Butt, 27, and Rachid Redouane, 30, who had said he was of Moroccan and Libyan extraction. News outlets scrambled to learn more about them, redoubling questions about the plotting that preceded the attack, and whether it should have come to authorities’ attention.

With an increasingly hard-fought general election set Thursday, fallout from Saturday’s attack took on ever-growing political significance.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party was still favored to win the largest share of seats in Parliament, but a poll published Monday by the organization YouGov suggested her party would fall 21 seats short of a 326-seat majority, while the rival Labor Party stood to increase its share.

For the last month, May has attempted to cast as the election’s centerpiece the terms of Britain’s exit from the European Union and her ability to provide stable leadership during fraught negotiations with the EU. Instead, she found herself forced to defend having presided over the cuts of thousands of police jobs during her six-year tenure as home secretary, the top security job.

Her chief rival, Jeremy Corbyn, said the prime minister should resign over the police cutbacks — a position he walked back somewhat by urging voters to let Thursday’s election be a referendum on that.

May, for her part, pointed to beefed-up security already in place, with more measures to come. “This was an attack on London and the United Kingdom, but it was also an attack on the free world,” she said Monday.

Max Abrahms, a political scientist at Northeastern University who has studied the impact of terrorist attacks on elections, said both Conservative and Labor leaders “are trying very hard to seem tough on terrorists,” adding: “There’s no question the attack in London will affect the election.”

Both candidates have also had to deal with another unexpected factor: President Trump. On Sunday and Monday, the president sharply criticized London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, with whom he previously feuded.

Corbyn denounced the presidential tweets; May defended Khan but refrained from directly criticizing Trump, who is highly unpopular in Britain...

Dutch Election Sows (Shows) Extreme Political Fragmentation

From Cas Muddle, an excellent scholar, at NYT:

MY take on Dutch elections. Headline by @nytimes doesn't really summarize different points made in it. #TK17 🇳🇱 https://t.co/9ZmoHAC936

— Cas Mudde (@CasMudde) March 16, 2017

The parliamentary election in the Netherlands on Wednesday was predicted to be the next populist show of strength after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election. The Dutch would be the first of a number of European countries to succumb to the right-wing populists’ siren songs in 2017, with the French not far behind.

It didn’t work out that way.

Geert Wilders, who is all too often described as a bleach blond or referred to as “the Dutch Trump,” did not defeat the conservative prime minister, Mark Rutte. In fact, he didn’t come close.

With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, Mr. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, or V.V.D., came first with 21.2 percent of the vote, compared to Mr. Wilders’s Party for Freedom, which took only 13.1 percent. Mr. Wilders barely improved on his margin in the 2012 election (where he took 10.1 percent) and failed to do as well as he did in 2010 (where he got 15.5 percent of the vote).

The real story in Dutch politics isn’t Mr. Wilders’s rise, it is the unprecedented fragmentation of the political system. Together, Mr. Rutte’s and Mr. Wilders’s parties look set to make up only 33 percent of the Parliament, with 11 more political parties constituting the rest. This splintering of Dutch politics is making effective governance of the country increasingly impossible.

While previous Parliaments have counted 14 or more factions, what has changed is the relative size of the parties. In 1986, the top three parties together won 85 percent of the vote. In 2003, it was down to 74 percent. Today it is just around 45 percent.

Because of its proportional representation system of voting, the Netherlands is an extreme case. But the trends are similar across Western Europe: The main center-right and center-left parties are shrinking, smaller parties are growing and unstable coalition politics are becoming the norm. There are many reasons for this — from secularization to deindustrialization to the emergence of new political issues, like the environment or immigration.

The consequences have been painfully visible across Europe for some time. It took Belgium 541 days to form a government after its 2010 election. Both Greece and Spain were in recent years forced to hold second elections after the first Parliaments failed to form coalitions. In the Netherlands, forming a government is not quite as difficult, but the next one will most likely be a coalition of four to six parties.

If the Party for Freedom is excluded — and almost all parties have pledged that they will refuse to serve in a coalition with Mr. Wilders — the government will probably consist of five or six medium-size parties that span almost the entire political spectrum. Given that the conservative V.V.D. and the Christian Democratic Appeal are ideologically closer to the Party for Freedom than they are to, for example, the Green Left party with which they will be governing, the government will be rightly perceived as an anti-Wilders coalition.

This will play right into Mr. Wilders’s hands. He has long argued that the Netherlands’ political parties are all the same. Being the leader of the largest opposition party against an internally divided, weak “anti-Wilders” coalition is undoubtedly his second most desired outcome of the elections — after, of course, winning an outright majority of the votes.

The only way to break this vicious circle is for the parties in government to come together to support a positive program, one that justifies their cooperation and their decision to exclude Mr. Wilders...

Immigration Fatigue Defines Dutch Elections

This is a great piece!

From Andrew Michta, at the American Interest:

A predictor for Europe: Immigration Fatigue Defines Dutch Elections @aminterest @RealClearWorld @Marshall_Center https://t.co/a5PdOqX0z1

— Andrew A. Michta (@andrewmichta) March 14, 2017

No matter the outcome, tomorrow’s parliamentary elections in the Netherlands will widen the divisions between European elites and publics.

As the Netherlands enters the final stretch in its 2017 election campaign, all eyes have turned to watch the political churning in this small but potentially significant EU member state. The intense interest by the international media is warranted; the Dutch election is the first of the “decisive three of 2017” (followed by elections in France and Germany) that many analysts believe will be leading indicators of the evolution of European politics in coming years. This has made the Dutch balloting in effect the first major European referendum on the past three decades’ immigration policy not only for Holland but also for the largest European countries.

Across Europe there has been a lot of polling, theorizing, opining, and (quite frankly) reading of tea leaves about the outcome of this vote. Paradoxically, the actual numbers of this election matter less than the political undercurrents it has brought to the surface. Geert Wilders’s anti-establishment, anti-immigration Party of Freedom (PVV) may still be positioned to deliver a stunning upset, though newer polling suggests a much tighter race. Still, the recent collapse of popular support for the social-democratic Labor Party (PvdA), a coalition partner of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) since 2012, has made any firm predictions about the outcome a mug’s game. Regardless of whether Geert Wilders’s PVV overtakes or comes a few seats short of current Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s VVD, election day will permanently alter Dutch politics—and the politics of Europe.

The consensus seems to be that, even if Wilders delivers an upset, it is unlikely that his party will be able to enter into a coalition government, and so it will most likely become an opposition party in Parliament. Still, even if the PVV is not able to enter into a coalition, much less form a government, its gains will shrink the center of Dutch politics, making the building of a workable coalition much more difficult. Most importantly, the Dutch election is likely to herald a broader European trend of the center losing more and more ground to extreme left and right political parties. As in the United Kingdom and the United States, the perception that elite policies have failed has spread throughout Dutch society. Wilders’s anti-immigrant message has resonated especially in the aftermath of the 2015-16 wave of migration from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA); the Netherlands has been a prime destination for migrants on account of its generous immigration and welfare policies.

Will the past three decades of multiculturalism and institutionalism continue to define the Continent’s future? This is precisely the question at issue in Europe today. The idea that Europe can in fact become a tapestry of comingling ethnicities and cultures has in only the past couple of years met with hardening resistance, not just in smaller countries like the Netherlands and Sweden but also, and perhaps more importantly, in the largest EU countries, including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. The gathering anti-immigrant rebellion in Europe has fueled a resurgent nationalism that cannot simply be dismissed as “populism” or “Islamophobia”—the default position of most media commentary. The predominantly Muslim wave of the current migration—including, for instance, the nearly one million MENA migrants that are estimated to have entered Germany in 2015–16—has contributed to the largest mass migration in Europe since the end of the Second World War (and furthermore, for the first time ever, members of the migrant wave predominantly hail from outside of Europe). At the same time, because of low levels of acculturation among these immigrants, citizenship in Europe is not generally seen as the primary identity marker. Public perceptions and differentiation in Europe increasingly focus on ethnic origin and religion. Hence, unlike in the United States, it matters less and less whether the Muslim population is first, second, or even third generation. One in five people living in the Netherlands is an immigrant or a child of immigrants. This is especially important in larger Dutch cities; for instance, in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, close to half of the population has a first- or second-generation immigrant background. For young people, the numbers are even higher, approaching two-thirds of school age children in those two cities. The high concentration of immigrant populations in Europe’s large cities is a pattern repeated across the Continent, from Paris and Copenhagen through Stockholm and Frankfurt to London and Brussels. The progressive balkanization of neighborhoods in these large cities of Western Europe is polarizing politics and raising tensions between the indigenous European population and immigrants and their descendants...

Keep reading.

Rise of the Populists: A Problem for Merkel and Germany

At Der Spiegel, "The state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania gave the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany a significant boost. It is a challenge for Chancellor Merkel and the entire country":

The rise of the right-wing populist AfD party in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is a problem for Merkel and Germany: https://t.co/JSae52FwfS

— SPIEGEL English (@SPIEGEL_English) September 5, 2016

From a national political perspective, the eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with its sparse population of 1.6 million, is a lightweight and largely meaningless. Usually. But this time around, following state parliament elections held there on Sunday, the situation is different. This vote, after all, was essentially a referendum on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her policies, which makes it quite meaningful indeed.

The results of that referendum don't look good for Merkel. Her center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) lost four percentage points relative to the last time the state's voters went to the polls in 2011 for a result of just 19 percent -- while the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) brought in fully 20.8 percent of the vote. The party didn't even exist five years ago.

To be sure, the CDU hasn't done particularly well in the state for 20 years, but it is home to the chancellor's own parliamentary constituency, which means that the AfD has essentially staged a revolution in Merkel's backyard. And it did so by turning the elections into a single-issue vote: Merkel's refugee policies.

The strategy was so successful that the CDU has been relegated to being just the third-strongest party in the state, behind the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) and the AfD. It marks the first time in Germany that the anti-Merkel party has come out ahead of Merkel's party -- and in some parts of the German leader's electoral district, AfD was the strongest party of all.

For the chancellor, it is a political debacle. Merkel must now come to terms with a challenge at least as monumental as the one which faced her predecessor Gerhard Schröder back in the mid-2000s. Back then, the SPD chancellor found himself trapped between, on the one hand, having to explain his cuts to social welfare benefits and, on the other, the rise of the Left Party, a political movement to the left of the SPD that was fueled by exactly those cuts. In the end, he failed on both counts.

The parallels to Merkel's situation -- a CDU that has been divided by her approach to the refugee crisis combined with the rise of a right-wing protest party -- are significant. But the end doesn't have to be the same. The Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania vote, after all, is only symbolically a debacle for Merkel. Her position as chancellor isn't (yet) at stake.

Emotions over Reason

But the returns on Sunday made clear that an increasing number of voters, at least in Germany's east, are turning their backs on the established, democratic party system. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to matter much if the economy is improving, cities are being renewed and the tourist sector is doing well, all of which are the case in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, which has been structurally weak since German reunification in 1990. And it is possible for a party to campaign on fears of refugees even in a state that very few foreigners call home.

In short, emotions would seem to have triumphed over reason. Facts took a back seat.

It is precisely here that the challenge lies for Merkel, a politician who has always staked her political success on clear arguments based on facts and figures. She will have to do more explaining and more communicating -- and she will have to embed her policies within an approachable, meaningful framework in order to keep her party behind her. She may also have to take a few rhetorical steps toward the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), which has been sharply critical of her stance on the refugee issue. That could include admitting that she has made some missteps...

I expect her to double down, and she may well decide not to seek reelection, leaving office satisfied that her administration did the humanitarian thing. She'll leave to her successors to clean up the mess. Fortunately, Germany's wealthy and prosperous. It'll work out for them. Perhaps not so much for all the other European countries who were brought along for the refugee ride, largely against their interests.

More.

How #Brexit Will Change America and the World

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "Britain is free of global government. America can be next":

How Brexit Will Change America and the World https://t.co/StFbinrG4S

— Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) June 24, 2016

Yesterday the British people stood up for their freedom. Today the world is a different place.

Celebrities and politicians swarmed television studios to plead with voters to stay in the EU. Anyone who wanted to leave was a fascist. Economists warned of total collapse if Britain left the European Union. Alarmist broadcasts threatened that every family would lose thousands of pounds a year if Brexit won.

Even Obama came out to warn Brits of the economic consequences of leaving behind the EU.

Every propaganda gimmick was rolled out. Brexit was dismissed, mocked and ridiculed. It was for lunatics and madmen. Anyone who voted to leave the benevolent bosom of the European Union was an ignorant xenophobe who had no place in the modern world. And that turned out to be most of Britain.

While Londonistan, that post-British city of high financial stakes and low Muslim mobs, voted by a landslide to remain, a decisive majority of the English voted to wave goodbye to the EU. 67% of Tower Hamlets, the Islamic stronghold, voted to stay in the EU. But to no avail. The will of the people prevailed.

And the people did not want migrant rape mobs in their streets and Muslim massacres in their pubs. They were tired of Afghani migrants living in posh homes with their four wives while they worked hard and sick of seeing their daughters passed around by “Asian” cabbies from Pakistan in ways utterly indistinguishable from the ISIS slave trade while the police looked the other way so as not to appear racist. And, most of all, they were sick of the entire Eurocratic establishment that let it all happen.

British voters chose freedom. They decided to reclaim their destiny and their nation from the likes of Count Herman Von Rompuy, the former President of the European Council, selected at an “informal” meeting who has opposed direct elections for his job and insisted that, “the word of the future is union.”

When Nigel Farage of UKIP told Count Von Rompuy that “I can speak on behalf of the majority of British people in saying that we don't know you, we don't want you and the sooner you are put out to grass, the better,” he was fined for it by the Bureau of the European Parliament after refusing to apologize. But now it’s Farage and the Independence Party who have had the last laugh.

The majority of British people didn’t want Count Von Rompuy and his million-dollar pension, or Donald Tusk, Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and the rest of the monkeys squatting on Britain’s back.

Count Von Rompuy has lost his British provinces. And the British people have their nation back.

The word of the future isn’t “union.” It’s “freedom.” A process has begun that will not end in Britain. It will spread around the world liberating nations from multinational institutions.

During Obama’s first year in office, Count Von Rompuy grandly declared that “2009 is also the first year of global governance.” Like many such predictions, it proved to be dangerously wrong. And now it may just well be that 2016 will be the first year of the decline and fall of global governance.

An anti-establishment wind is blowing through the creaky house of global government. The peoples of the free world have seen how the choking mass of multilateral institutions failed them economically and politically. Global government is an expensive and totalitarian proposition that silences free speech and funnels rapists from Syria, Sudan and Afghanistan to the streets of European cities and American towns. It’s a boon for professional consultants, certain financial insiders and politicians who can hop around unelected offices and retire with vast unearned pensions while their constituents are told to work another decade. But global government is misery and malaise for everyone else.

The campaign to stay in the EU relied on fear and alarmism, on claims of bigotry and disdain for the working class voters who fought and won the right to decide their own destiny. But the campaign for independence asked Britons to believe in their own potential when unchained from the Eurocratic bureaucracy. And now Brexit will become a model for liberation campaigns across Europe.

Germany Turns Right (VIDEO)

From Jan-Werner Müller, at the New York Review of Books, "Behind the New German Right":

Throughout its postwar history, Germany somehow managed to resist the temptations of right-wing populism. Not any longer. On March 13, the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD)—a party that has said it may be necessary to shoot at migrants trying to enter the country illegally and that has mooted the idea of banning mosques—scored double-digit results in elections in three German states; in one, Saxony-Anhalt, the party took almost a quarter of the vote. For some observers, the success of the AfD is just evidence of Germany’s further “normalization”: other major countries, such as France, have long had parties that oppose European integration and condemn the existing political establishment for failing properly to represent the people—why should Germany be an exception?

Such complacency is unjustified, for at least two reasons: the AfD has fed off and in turn encouraged a radical street movement, the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West,” or Pegida, that has no equivalent elsewhere in Europe. And perhaps most important, the AfD’s warnings about the “slow cultural extinction” of Germany that supposedly will result from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcoming of more than a million refugees have been echoed by a number of prominent intellectuals. In fact, the conceptual underpinnings for what one AfD ideologue has called “avant-garde conservatism” can be found in the recent work of several mainstream German writers and philosophers. Never since the end of the Nazi era has a right-wing party enjoyed such broad cultural support. How did this happen?

The AfD was founded in 2013 by a group of perfectly respectable, deeply uncharismatic economics professors. Its very name, Alternative for Germany, was chosen to contest Angela Merkel’s claim that there was no alternative to her policies to address the eurocrisis.The professors opposed the euro, since, in their eyes, it placed excessive financial burdens on the German taxpayer and sowed discord among European states. But they did not demand the dissolution of the European Union itself in the way right-wing populists elsewhere in Europe have done. Still, Germany’s mainstream parties sought to tar them as “anti-European,” which reinforced among many voters the sense that the country’s political establishment made discussion of certain policy choices effectively taboo. Like other new parties, the AfD attracted all kinds of political adventurers. But it also provided a home for conservatives who thought that many of Merkel’s policies—ending nuclear energy and the military draft, endorsing same-sex unions, and raising the minimum wage—had moved her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) too far to the left. Since there was a mainstream conservative view opposing many of these decisions, the AfD could now occupy space to the right of the CDU without suspicion of being undemocratic or of harking back to the Nazi past.

The AfD narrowly failed to enter the German parliament in 2013, but managed to send seven deputies to Brussels after the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, where they joined an alliance of Euroskeptic parties led by Britain’s conservatives. With outward success came internal strife. Young right-wingers challenged the AfD’s professors with initiatives such as the “Patriotic Platform,” which appeared closer to the nationalist far right than an authentically conservative CDU. In summer 2015, most of the founders of the AfD walked away; one expressed his regret about having created a “monster.” The AfD seemed destined to follow the path of so many protest parties, brought down by infighting, a lack of professionalism, and the failure to nurture enough qualified personnel to do the day-to-day parliamentary politics it would have to engage in to become more than a flash in the pan.

And then the party was saved by Angela Merkel. Or so the AfD’s new, far more radical leaders have been saying ever since the chancellor announced her hugely controversial refugee policy last summer. At the time, her decision was widely endorsed, but in the months since, her support has declined precipitously—while the AfD’s has surged. Many fear that the German state is losing control of the situation, and blame Merkel for failing to negotiate a genuinely pan-European approach to the crisis. Alexander Gauland, a senior former CDU politician and now one of the most recognizable AfD leaders—he cultivates the appearance of a traditional British Tory, including tweed jackets and frequent references to Edmund Burke—has called the refugee crisis a “gift” for the AfD.

Others have gone further. Consider the statements of Beatrix von Storch, a countess from Lower Saxony who is one of the AfD’s deputies to the European Parliament, where she just joined the group that includes UKIP and the far right Sweden Democrats. A promoter of both free-market ideas and Christian fundamentalism she has gone on record as saying that border guards might have to use firearms against refugees trying illegally to cross the border—including women and children. After much criticism, she conceded that children might be exempted, but not women.

Such statements are meant to exploit what the AfD sees as a broadening fear among voters that the new arrivals pose a deep threat to German culture. The AfD will present a full-fledged political program after a conference at the very end of April, but early indications are that there will be a heavy emphasis on preventing what the party views as the Islamization of Germany. A draft version of the program contains phrases such as “We are and want to remain Germans”—and the real meaning of such platitudes is then made concrete with the call to prohibit the construction of minarets. It is here that the orientation of AfD and the far more strident, anti-Islam Pegida movement most clearly overlap...

Keep reading.

Rotten in Denmark: 'Growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy...'

Get a kick out of this, from Hugh Eakin, at the New York Review of Books, "Liberal, Harsh Denmark":

In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters have brought to power a right-wing party whose leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and “various types of parasites” to Europe. In France’s regional elections in December, some Socialist candidates withdrew at the last minute to support the conservatives and prevent the far-right National Front from winning. Even Germany, which took in more than a million asylum-seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of North African origin.

And then there is Denmark. A small, wealthy Scandinavian democracy of 5.6 million people, it is according to most measures one of the most open and egalitarian countries in the world. It has the highest income equality and one of the lowest poverty rates of any Western nation. Known for its nearly carbon-neutral cities, its free health care and university education for all, its bus drivers who are paid like accountants, its robust defense of gay rights and social freedoms, and its vigorous culture of social and political debate, the country has long been envied as a social-democratic success, a place where the state has an improbably durable record of doing good. Danish leaders also have a history of protecting religious minorities: the country was unique in Nazi-occupied Europe in prosecuting anti-Semitism and rescuing almost its entire Jewish population.

When it comes to refugees, however, Denmark has long led the continent in its shift to the right—and in its growing domestic consensus that large-scale Muslim immigration is incompatible with European social democracy. To the visitor, the country’s resistance to immigrants from Africa and the Middle East can seem implacable. In last June’s Danish national election—months before the Syrian refugee crisis hit Europe—the debate centered around whether the incumbent, center-left Social Democrats or their challengers, the center-right Liberal Party, were tougher on asylum-seekers. The main victor was the Danish People’s Party, a populist, openly anti-immigration party, which drew 21 percent of the vote, its best performance ever. Its founder, Pia Kjærsgaard, for years known for suggesting that Muslims “are at a lower stage of civilization,” is now speaker of the Danish parliament. With the backing of the Danish People’s Party, the center-right Liberals formed a minority government that has taken one of the hardest lines on refugees of any European nation...

Leftists are constantly spewing about how great Scandinavian countries like Denmark are, claiming that their social welfare-state economies are superior to the U.S., blah blah.

Heh, not so much when it comes to Muslim "refugees" though.

Keep reading.

Greece Passes Austerity Measures

At WSJ, "Greece’s Parliament Passes Austerity Measures Required for Bailout":

Greece’s Parliament passed austerity measures needed to secure a fresh bailout, but a rebellion within the ruling Syriza party is testing whether Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras can hold his government together as he seeks to complete the deal.

The measures, which include steep spending cuts and tax increases, were approved early Thursday by 229 lawmakers in the country’s 300-seat Parliament, many of them opposition lawmakers. Among the 149 lawmakers in Mr. Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza party, 32 voted against the deal—including former finance chief Yanis Varoufakis—and six abstained.

To counter the rebellion within his party, the Greek premier is expected to announce a cabinet shake-up on Thursday, according to government officials. But it remains uncertain how long Mr. Tsipras can continue in office without calling new elections.

The vote “is a serious division in Syriza’s parliamentary group,” said a government spokesman. “The basic priority of the prime minister and the government is the successful completion of the agreement in the coming period.”

The vote came hours after the European Commission proposed a fix to Mr. Tsipras’s other immediate challenge: how to pay a €4.2 billion ($4.6 billion) payment due to the European Central Bank on Monday. To cover that and Greece’s other most pressing bills, the commission called for giving Athens a €7 billion bridge loan from a European Union bailout fund.

In Athens, Mr. Tsipras is expected to replace several ministers—including three who voted against the austerity measures—with people more likely to help him implement the measures required as part of the rescue agreement, officials say.

The Greek premier could also expel lawmakers who vote against the government. That would leave them with a choice of resigning their seat, in line with Syriza’s code of conduct, or carrying on as independents. The former outcome would allow Mr. Tsipras to replace them, while the latter scenario would weaken his power.

Shortly before the vote, he appealed for unity in support of the austerity measures being put to a vote. Parliamentary approval of the austerity measures was a prerequisite demanded in exchange for as much as €86 billion in bailout loans over the next three years from the eurozone and International Monetary Fund.

“I don’t believe the measures will benefit the economy, but we are forced to adopt them,” Mr. Tsipras told lawmakers.

The premier also referred to comments made by IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who on Wednesday urged the eurozone to provide Greece with debt relief. “This is a positive outcome and the only hope of getting out of the crisis,” he said.

Fresh cracks in Mr. Tsipras’s government appeared on Wednesday before the vote, with the resignation of deputy finance minister Nantia Valavani over the bailout, though she last week backed Mr. Tsipras’s decision to seek the new rescue agreement.

“It is one thing to face an exceptionally difficult reality and catastrophe with hope and a future of dignity and independence,” she said in a letter sent to the Greek premier. “It is another issue to handle a catastrophe that will be completed with whatever national income is left heading abroad for the repayment of debt that cannot be repaid in centuries.”

Ahead of the vote, about 13,000 took to the streets to protest against the new bailout, while public sector workers walked off their jobs in a 24-hour strike.

Later on Wednesday, a small group of demonstrators clashed with police, throwing Molotov cocktails. More than 30 protesters were detained, according to police officials.

Nobody knows how long the 40-year-old prime minister can maintain the backing of his own Syriza party, and its right-wing coalition partner Independent Greeks. Completing the bailout agreement is likely to take several weeks. Selling the tough austerity policies attached to it has been Mr. Tsipras’s biggest political test at home since he swept to victory in an election in January on an antiausterity ticket.

The rebellion threatens to leave Mr. Tsipras’s coalition short of a majority in the Parliament. Some Syriza lawmakers have spoken of “threatening” developments for their party if it reneged on its key electoral promise of opposing austerity. Others said they recognized the urgency of Greece’s financial situation as the country faces bankruptcy and a probable exit from the eurozone unless it complete the steps needed to clinch rescue financing...

More.

Also at Euronews, "Greek parliament approves tough reforms demanded by Brussels," and "Greek PM relies on opposition support to pass reforms."

Center-Right Opposition Ousts Social Democrat Helle Thorning-Schmidt in Denmark Elections

You know, the European left keeps getting hammered at the polls, especially on the issue of unchecked immigration. And in Denmark, that bastion of social democrat progressivism!

At Reuters, "Danish centre-right opposition wins election, PM quits party":

Danish voters ousted Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt in an election on Thursday and handed power to an opposition centre-right alliance including huge gains for a eurosceptic, anti-immigrant party.

Opposition leader Lars Lokke Rasmussen said he would try to form a government but is likely to have to make big concessions to ensure support from the right-wing Danish Peoples' Party (DF), which ended up with more votes than his Liberal Party.

With all of the votes counted on the mainland, the centre-right won 90 seats in parliament to 85 seats for the centre-left bloc of Thorning-Schmidt, who wrongly gambled that an economic upturn would win her re-election.

Denmark's first female prime minister, elected in 2011, Thorning-Schmidt conceded defeat and quit as party leader after the vote.

DF, the second-biggest party behind Thorning-Schmidt's Social Democrats, has supported the Liberals in government before and its backing gives the centre-right led by Rasmussen its overall majority.

"Tonight we have been given an opportunity, but only an opportunity, to take leadership in Denmark," Rasmussen told supporters in parliament.

"We take that upon ourselves and I take that upon myself ... What I offer today is to put myself at the head of a government," he said.

More.

Yeah, immigration's obviously a touchy issue with the voters, especially after the leftist government's Islamic appeasement policies: "Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt: 'This is not a war between Islam and the West...'"

And at Instapundit, "CHANGE: Obama’s Favorite Prime Minister Concedes to Center-Right Bloc."

Turkey Faces Political Uncertainty

At the Wall Street Journal, "Turkey Faces a New Political Reality":

ISTANBUL—The surprisingly weak showing by Turkey’s ruling party in parliamentary elections is raising the specter of protracted uncertainty for a key U.S. ally facing mounting economic and national security challenges.

Sunday’s election upset derailed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to transform Turkey’s government into a strong presidential system with him at its head.

It also left the party he led for more than a decade scrambling to find a coalition partner to form a governing majority from among three parties hostile to his aims, and Mr. Erdogan himself to try to wield power without a majority from a post that technically is largely ceremonial.

“It’s going to be much harder for him to get what he wants,” said Steven Cook, a Turkey analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, noting he is weaker within his own country. “The language he’s used over the past couple of years has alienated Turkish voters.”

Some of Turkey’s Western allies welcomed the brake on Mr. Erdogan’s rapidly growing power; a European official hailed the vote as a check on “the increasing Putinization” of Turkey’s political system.

Diplomats said a more diverse parliament could reverse a deterioration of relations with the U.S. and other North Atlantic Treaty Organization partners as well as the European Union, which Ankara seeks to join.

“Politics will be messy and noisy. There are difficult economic issues, difficult regional issues…but I think the republic is well-poised now to deal with them,” said Francis Ricciardone, a former U.S. ambassador to Ankara now at the Atlantic Council, a think tank. “This will be good for Turkey.”

But the election result also has fed fears that a volatile period of fractious coalition governments could destabilize Turkey at a time of gathering threats including a slowdown in growth, the threat of Islamic State militants across its southern borders and fragile peace talks to end a three-decade Kurdish insurgency that has cost 30,000 lives.

In Washington, the State Department praised the high turnout in Turkey’s elections over the weekend. “The United States looks forward to working with the newly elected parliament and with the future government,” it said.

Current and former U.S. officials said Mr. Erdogan’s setback could force him to moderate his political rule and set a less controversial path on the global stage.

But it was unclear whether that will make him a better partner for Washington, particularly on policies relating to the battle against Islamic State and internal issues like press freedoms.

President Barack Obama signaled on Monday that the U.S.’s priority with Turkey will be that it do more to cut off militant fighters flowing into Syria. The U.S. believes most of the Islamic State’s foreign fighters enter Syria from Turkey.

“If we can cut off some of that foreign fighter flow, then we are able to isolate and wear out [Islamic State] forces that are already there,” Mr. Obama said at the Group of Seven leaders meeting in Germany. Turkey has dramatically boosted intelligence cooperation with its western partners since last summer and has deported some 1,200 suspected foreign fighters seeking to cross into Syria...

Still more.

Postcard from Britain: Immigration Is Hot Issue as Elections Approach

Well, better late than never, I guess.

At the New York Times, "As Elections Approach, a Desire To Roll Up the Welcome Mat":

LONDON — John O’Keefe, a neuroscientist at University College in London, brought pride to Britain last week when he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery, in rats, of the brain’s “GPS” system. But Dr. O’Keefe, American-born, had some unwelcome criticism for his adopted country.

Britain’s efforts to restrict immigration have become “a very, very large obstacle” to hiring the best scientists, he said. “We should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place.”

That is precisely the opposite of the current mood in Britain, seven months before an election, where immigration, the economy and the health service are the hottest issues.

Before the elections in 2010, David Cameron, now prime minister, had vowed to reduce net migration to less than 100,000 a year by 2015, including migrants from within the European Union, which has a fundamental principle that all citizens may live and work in any member country. Home Secretary Theresa May wants to reduce the figure to tens of thousands.

But there is a long and awkward way to go. While the government has set targets, it has little control over the variables. In the year ended March 2014, the government reports, 265,000 non-European Union citizens moved to Britain, ending a steady decline since the recent peak of 334,000 in 2011. Net immigration to Britain from the European Union rose to 130,000 in the year through March, up from 75,000 two years ago.

Total net immigration in the year through March was 243,000. That is back up to the 10-year average of nearly a quarter of a million people, said Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch U.K., which advocates restrictions. “If allowed to continue,” he said, the population will increase by 12 million — two more Scotlands — in 20 years. “That’s huge,” he said, arguing that three-quarters of British voters “want to see it reduced.”

So immigration is a fertile topic for the right and for the nationalist U.K. Independence Party, which is squeezing Mr. Cameron, and it is so sensitive with voters that even the opposition Labour Party has little to say about it.

Thursday’s two by-elections were a warning shot for both parties. UKIP won the seat in Clacton-on-Sea by a large margin, as expected, after the legislator Douglas Carswell defected from the Tories to join Nigel Farage and UKIP. That was historic, because Mr. Carswell became UKIP’s first elected member of Parliament. But what really shook the ground was the by-election in Heywood and Middleton, near Manchester, when the UKIP candidate came within 617 votes of defeating the heavily favored Labour candidate in the Labour Party’s heartland.

By-elections are famous for protest votes that don’t usually carry over to the general election. But UKIP, an essentially English nationalist party, is making headway against both main parties on the issues of sharply reducing immigration and quitting the European Union... 

More at that top link.

Funny, but sometimes the journalistic standard of promoting balance is completely idiotic. Clearly, British elites --- uniformly pro-immigration, apparently --- just don't get it. Britain is Balkanized, crime-ridden, and rotting at the core from the progressive depravity of political correctness. The rank-and-file masses of traditional Britain have woken up to the poxy elite destruction of their once great nation. Ostensibly "right-wing" parties are making record gains, not just in Britain. The left will denounce these trends as "xenophobia" and "racism," but the fact is that basic decency and common sense are making a comeback. Such old-fashioned values scare the crap out of vile progressives. The traditional push-back is destroying the very platform of social destruction that is the essence of radical progressivism.

FEMEN Anti-Fascist Protesters in France

Well, these ladies are a relief compared to the monstrous #YesAllWomen feminists.

At WWTDD, "FEMEN Protesters Frenched Up."

And video at Live Leak, "France: FEMEN nurses protest far-right Le Pen's vote."

BONUS: ICYMI, my earlier entries on European Parliament Elections.

Spain's Socialist Leader Resigns After Party Hammered in European Elections

At Toronto's Globe and Mail,"Euroskeptic election surge threatens governments across EU":

Spain’s Socialist opposition leader Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said on Monday he was stepping down after the party had its worst-ever election result on Sunday with an upstart rival leftist group grabbing 8 per cent of the vote.  Recession-weary voters, unhappy with public-sector wage cuts, layoffs and corruption scandals also punished the ruling center-right People’s Party.

Together, the two parties that have dominated Spanish politics since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s, took less than 50 per cent of the vote. A brand new leftist party led by 35-year-old university professor Pablo Iglesias was the big winner, taking 8 per cent of the vote and five seats in the European Parliament.

The Socialists lost nine of their 23 seats in the European Parliament while the ruling centre-right People’s Party lost eight of its 24 seats. Together, the two parties that have dominated Spanish politics since the country returned to democracy in the 1970s, took less than 50 per cent of the vote.

“It’s clear that we haven’t regained voters’ confidence,” Mr. Rubalcaba said in a televised news conference. “There has to be new leadership that takes on change.”

More at the Chicago Tribune, "Spain's Socialist leader quits after party's worst-ever election."

And a new leftist party, "Podemos," took five out of Spain's 54 seats in the European Parliament. At the BBC, "Spain's 'we can' party proves it can."  Pablo Iglesias, the party leader, can be seen at the clip above.

PREVIOUSLY: "Established Parties Rocked by Anti-Europe Vote."

Danish People's Party Wins Nearly 27 Percent of Vote in European Parliament Elections

That's Morten Messerschmidt of the DDP at the clip.

And this is especially interesting for Denmark, which is the quintessential European social welfare state.

And at the Guardian UK, "Far-right takes victory in Danish European elections."

And at Telegraph UK, "EU election 2014: Danish eurosceptic People's Party wins - and calls for alliance with Cameron":

The eurosceptic wave that swept across the continent engulfed Denmark on Sunday night, as the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party topped the polls at the European election.

The DPP, which had campaigned to reclaim border controls and curb benefits to other EU citizens living in Denmark, won 26.7 per cent of the vote – and doubled its number of MEPs from two to four.

The result means that Ukip, France's Front National, and the DPP are the three biggest eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament. But the DPP - like Ukip - has repeatedly distanced itself from Marine Le Pen's FN – and on Sunday night announced that they were seeking an alliance with David Cameron's party.

"We want as much influence as possible in order to pull Europe in another direction, namely in the British direction," said Morten Messerschmidt, the leading DPP candidate. He said Mr Cameron and Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, were potential partners.

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "UKIP's Political Earthquake," and "National Front Smashes French Establishment in European Parliament Elections."

National Front Smashes French Establishment in European Parliament Elections

At the Guardian UK, "Front National wins European parliament elections in France."

And at Telegraph UK, "EU elections 2014: France's Hollande holds crisis talks on record far-Right win":

President François Hollande staged a crisis cabinet meeting at the Elysée Palace this morning as France reeled from the “earthquake” of seeing the far-Right Front National come first in European elections.

The deeply unpopular Mr Hollande scrambled his government to find ways to parry what is the French Socialist Party’s worst score since European elections were first held in 1979.

The president may make a televised statement reacting to the rout that saw Marine Le Pen’s FN come top in a nationwide vote for the first time in its 40-year history. Sunday’s election saw FN clinch almost 25 per cent of the vote, according to IFOP, quadrupling its 2009 score.

Miss Le Pen said it constituted a "massive rejection of the European Union" and a desire for “politics by the French, for the with the French". “They don’t want to be led anymore from outside, to submit to laws,” she insisted.

The FN finished well ahead of the opposition centre-Right UMP of Nicolas Sarkozy, on 20.8 per cent, and which remains deeply split over Europe and appears on course for another bloody leadership battle.

The ruling Socialists mustered less than 14 per cent with the centrist UDI-Modem on 9.9 per cent and the Greens on 8.9 per cent.

This suggests the FN will now have 24 seats in the European Parliament of the 74 allotted to France – up from three in 2009 – leaving the UMP with 20, the Socialists with 13, the centrists with seven and the Greens with six.

While other parties’ main message on Europe appeared ill-defined or even divided, "the Front National was able to mobilise the electorate thanks to a clear line on Europe and immigration”, Joël Gombin, an FN expert, told Le Nouvel Observateur.

Hmm, I wonder if these result have implication for the 2014 midterms back in the states? Perhaps there's a desire for "politics by the Americans, for the with the Americans."

PREVIOUSLY: "UKIP's Political Earthquake."

UKIP's Political Earthquake

At Blazing Cat Fur, "'The most extraordinary result in 100 years': Farage hails UKIP triumph as Labour and the Tories are humiliated."

And from Enza Ferreri, at Frontpage Magazine, "‘Earthquake’ in the U.K.":

“An earthquake” is how the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) described what happened Thursday May 22 when all Britain voted to elect its share of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and various parts of the country voted to elect local councils.

While the results of the Euro Elections were not announced until Sunday to wait for the results of the whole European Union, where some countries voted later, the local election results were known immediately, and were pretty much as Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader, described them: an earthquake. In a country with a three-main-party system (Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats), the UKIP became firmly established as the fourth party. It didn’t gain overall control of any local council, but that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Labour won 338 more councillors than it previously had, the Conservatives were down 231 councillors, the Liberal Democrats took a bashing losing 307, as many as 40 percent of their councillors, and UKIP went from two to an astonishing 163 councillors, turning from a fringe, tiny party into a serious contender for government.

But it was last night, at the European Elections, that UKIP got a real triumph. Not only did it top the polls with more votes than all other parties for the first time in its history, but its victory also marked the first time in which a nationally-held election has not been won by either the Conservative Party or the Labour Party since 1906.

This historical event upsets all the current paradigms of British politics. For a start, it makes it much more difficult to predict future election results, including the 2015 general elections for the British Parliament, the “real” polls that will decide who’s going to govern the UK.

A three-party system is easier to understand and forecast than a four-party one. Without UKIP, Labour might have been cast as the next British government, benefiting from the dissatisfaction from the supposed “cuts” and “austerity” measures that the present coalition of Tories and Lib Dems in government had to enforce to heal at least in part the ruinously irresponsible economy and welfare policies of the past Labour administration.  Something similar happened in other parts of Europe, hence the BBC’s headline, “Eurosceptic ‘earthquake’ rocks EU elections,” in reference to the parallel result of Marine Le Pen’s Front National which won a record victory in France.

Back in the UK, the Liberal Democrats were almost wiped out from the European Parliament, being left with just one MEP of the 11 they previously had. This is Catherine Zena Bearder, standing in the South East, the largest region in the UK, where my party, one-year-old Liberty GB, got 2494 votes.  These results show a clear shift in public opinion towards a decidedly anti-immigration, anti-European-Union stance.  The reaction of the (previously) three main parties and of the liberal media is interesting because it shows that they simply don’t get it.

They cling to justifications, rationalizations, excuses, pedantic nitpicking, like “it hasn’t been an earthquake because UKIP has no control of a single council” or “it’s just a temporary protest vote. They’ll come back to us.”

Also at London's Daily Mail, "'We're coming for YOU, Red Ed': Farage boasts there is no limit to UKIP's ambitions as he reveals plan to go after Miliband's Doncaster seat in the wake of Euro triumph."

BuzzFeed Alleges Breitbart/Pajamas Media Payola on Ukraine Politics

Naturally, deranged lizard blogger Charles Johnson would pick this up, via Memeorandum.

But let's go right to Rosie Gray at BuzzFeed, "Exclusive: How Ukraine Wooed Conservative Websites":

WASHINGTON — Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.

The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.

The model resembles a recent stealth campaign in which bloggers were paid by the Malaysian government to write favorable stories, though the Ukraine campaign appears to have involved smaller sums of money.

One of the writers who participated in the campaign, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and because of lingering qualms about the arrangement, they said, described being offered $500 for a blog post praising Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions. The payment was arranged by George Scoville, a libertarian media strategist, and Scoville’s name was on the check, the source said.

An email from October 26, 2012 shows Scoville inviting writers to join a conference with Mikhail Okhendovskyy of Ukraine’s Central Election Commission. The call was organized by the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a Brussels-based group headed by Leonid Khazara, a former senior member of parliament from the pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. According to its website, it is a “a unique ‘Modern Ukraine’ organisation based in Brussels and operating internationally as an advocate for enhancing EU-Ukraine relations.”

In practical terms, the ECFMU exists to promote Yanukovych and the party — but its nominal independence means that its representatives in Washington do not need to register as foreign agents and make the extensive disclosures required under that program. Instead, the only evidence of its activity comes in the far more relaxed domestic lobbying disclosure law, which shows that the Brussels-based group employs two well-connected Washington lobbying firms, The Podesta Group and Mercury/Clark and Weinstock.

One email from October 29, the day after the election, shows Scoville sending out documents full of exit poll results and prepackaged statements from election observers.

“I just wanted to share the attached documents with you in case you were interested,” Scoville writes. “You’re under no obligation to write anything, but I wanted you to have this info in case you were feeling nostalgic and/or entrepreneurial :)”.

“But in all seriousness, if you could spend a few minutes today tweeting about the results using #ukrainevotes and promoting some of the pieces you wrote, that would be very helpful to us,” Scoville writes.

So far it's just the crazed lizard dolt at Memeorandum, although Boing Boing had the story a couple of days ago, so it's not like the idiot Johnson "broke" the story or anything, the f-king moron.

And hey, I'll believe this story when BuzzFeed posts all the email evidence and the name of the so-called anonymous "writer" making the allegations.

100 Years Later, the Continuing Relevance of World War I

I can't recall reading a better newspaper summary of World War I, at Der Spiegel, "Disaster Centennial: The Disturbing Relevance of World War I":

It has now been 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, but the European catastrophe remains relevant today. As the Continent looks back this year, old wounds could once again be rubbed raw.

Joachim Gauck, the 11th president of the Federal Republic of Germany, executes his duties in a palace built for the Hohenzollern dynasty. But almost all memories of Prussian glory have been eliminated from Bellevue Palace in Berlin, where there is no pomp and there are no uniforms and few flags. The second door on the left in the entrance hall leads into a parlor where Gauck receives visitors.

In the so-called official room, there are busts of poet Heinrich von Kleist and Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, the first German president after Kaiser Wilhelm II fled the country into exile, on a shelf behind the desk. There are two paintings on the wall: an Italian landscape by a German painter, and a view of Dresden by Canaletto, the Italian painter. Gauck likes the symbolism. Nations and their people often view both the world and the past from different perspectives. The president says that he doesn't find this disconcerting, because he is aware of the reasons. In 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the eyes of the world will be focused on Germany's head of state. It will be the biggest historical event to date in the 21st century.

And Gauck represents the losers.

More than 60 million soldiers from five continents participated in that orgy of violence. Almost one in six men died, and millions returned home with injuries or missing body parts -- noses, jaws, arms. Countries like France, Belgium and the United Kingdom are planning international memorial events, wreath-laying ceremonies, concerts and exhibits, as are faraway nations like New Zealand and Australia, which formed their identities during the war.

Poles, citizens of the Baltic countries, Czechs and Slovaks will also commemorate the years between 1914 and 1918, because they emerged as sovereign nations from the murderous conflict between the Entente and the Central Powers.

Unthinkable in Germany

In the coming months, World War I will become a mega issue in the public culture of commemoration. The international book market will present about 150 titles in Germany alone, and twice as many in France -- probably a world record for a historic subject. The story of a generation that has long passed on will be retold. New questions will be asked and new debates will unfold. British Prime Minister David Cameron is even making funds available to enable all children attending Britain's government-run schools to visit the battlefields of the Western Front.

A response of this nature would be unthinkable in pacifist Germany.

But Western Europeans paid a higher death toll in World War I than in any other war in their history, which is why they call it "The Great War" or "La Grande Guerre." Twice as many Britons, three times as many Belgians and four times as many Frenchmen died on the Maas and the Somme than in all of World War II. That's one of the reasons, says Gauck in his office in the Hohenzollern palace, why he could imagine "a German commemoration of World War I as merely a sign of respect for the suffering of those we were fighting at the time."

The "Great War" was not only particularly bloody, but it also ushered in a new era of warfare, involving tanks, aircraft and even chemical weapons. Its outcome would shape the course of history for years to come, even for an entire century in some regions.

In the coming weeks, SPIEGEL will describe the consequences of World War I that continue to affect us today: the emergence of the United States as the world's policeman, France's unique view of Germany, the ethnic hostilities in the Balkans and the arbitrary drawing of borders in the Middle East, consequences that continue to burden and impede the peaceful coexistence of nations to this day.

Several summit meetings are scheduled for the 2014 political calendar, some with and some without Gauck. Queen Elizabeth II will receive the leaders of Commonwealth countries in Glasgow Cathedral. Australia, New Zealand, Poland and Slovenia are also planning meetings of the presidents or prime ministers of all or selected countries involved in World War I.

'A Different Nation Today'

August 3 is at the top of Gauck's list. On that day, he and French President François Hollande will commemorate the war dead at Hartmannswillerkopf, a peak in the Alsace region that was bitterly contested by the Germans and the French in the war. The German president is also among the more than 50 heads of state of all countries involved in World War I who will attend a ceremony at the fortress of Liège hosted by Belgium's King Philippe. Gauck, a former citizen of East Germany, sees himself as "the German who represents a different nation today, and who remembers the various horrors that are associated with the German state."

The 73-year-old president hopes that the series of commemorative events will remind Europeans how far European integration has come since 1945. Gauck notes that the "absolute focus on national interests" à la 1914/1918 did not led to happy times for any of the wartime enemies.

But he knows that the memory of the horrors of a war doesn't just reconcile former enemies but can also tear open wounds that had become scarred over. In this respect, the centenary of World War I comes at an unfavorable time. Many European countries are seeing a surge of nationalist movements and of anti-German sentiment prior to elections to the European Parliament in May 2014.

In a recent poll, 88 percent of Spanish, 82 percent of Italian and 56 percent of French respondents said that Germany has too much influence in the European Union. Some even likened today's Germany to the realm of the blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Last August, a British journalist emerged from a conversation with the press attaché at the German Embassy in London with the impression that Berlin, in the interest of promoting reconciliation, wanted to take part in commemorative ceremony in neighboring countries. This led to an outcry in the British press, which claimed that the Germans were trying to prevent the British from celebrating their victory in World War I ...

It's a fairly long read, but worth your time.

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And previously, "Today's Parallels with World War One's International Politics."