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I posted this on another forum I visit. The confusing world of EU-Parliament politics I tried to make as simple as I could, to impart my m,any boring hours of trying to make sense of it over the years. The figures in the below graphic are not exactly the blocs as they are currently constituted, but rather are based on ideology. Example: The FN in France is not attached to the "nationalist" bloc of which the moderate Danish People's Party is a member, but the two are clearly ideologically basically on the same wavelength - so I counted them together. Nor are the British Tories in the "center-right bloc" (for some odd reason) right now, but I attached them thereto as well...
European Socialism Suffers Body Blow
Twenty years after the Fall of the Wall, left-wing parties -- including reconstructed communists and their one-time sympathizers -- have still been going strong all across Europe.
The latest news from Europe suggests this may be changing.
The recently-held E.U.-Parliament elections saw self-described Socialists and neoCommunists drop to under 30% of total seats, from their previous total of well over 34%.
Highlights
-- The German center-left SPD (once a bastion of communist-sympathizers and Stasi agents) scored its lowest result ever.
-- The British Labour party went down in a pathetic defeat, scoring its lowest share of the vote since before World War I.
--Likely the biggest winners were the patriotic, nationalist, and in many cases quasi-racialist parties from east to west (many breaking through and entering the EU Parliament for the first time); from the clean-cut BNP in England, to the anti-Islamic Geert Wilders movement in the Netherlands, to the now stunningly-popular "Austrian Freedom Party", to the nationalist, racialist, anti-Gypsy "Movement for a Better Hungary", to the "Greater Romania Party" and the wildly-anti-Turkish "Bulgarian National Union Party", and back full-circle to the clean-cut Danish People's Party, among the most successful of the immigration restrictionist parties across the EU.
Results nation-by-nation and by party grouping (it's all very complicated for the uninitiated; you'll just have to trust my summary in the above...) --> http://www.elections2009-results.eu/...iament_en.html
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