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Monday, June 08, 2009

European Parliament Elections

Ropi sent me a link to this Guardian article on the European elections. This was his first time voting and he offered some of his thoughts about voting the other day.

The article he sent certainly reminds me how little how I know about how European Parliamentary politics work. Each of these country overviews (the article is much longer) is just the makeup on the face of the politics of the countries. Anyone ready to write an equivalent paragraph describing the 2008 US election in 40 words or less? Well, at least we know about American Idol if we don't know who the Prime Minister of Spain is.

France

Two parties claimed victories in the French European elections last night: Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling centre-right UMP topped the poll, but the new green coalition, Europe Ecologie, won a surprisingly high tally, forcing climate change back onto the agenda for all French politicians.

Italy

Projections in Italy indicated Silvio ­Berlusconi had suffered a clear setback after a campaign dominated by the ­controversy surrounding him.

Spain

Spain's rightwing People's party won its first national victory for nine years, as Socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero paid the price of recession. Zapatero saw his Socialists slide to a loss by 3.7 percentage points 15 months after winning a general election.



Ireland

Voters rejected both the ruling Fianna Fail-Green party coalition and the country's most famous Eurosceptic, Declan Ganley, in European, local and Dáil by­elections over the weekend.

Hungary

A fringe neofascist party, Jobbik, made a breakthrough by winning three out of 22 seats in Hungary where the main centre-right opposition party, Fidesz, has won 14 seats, the governing Socialist party four seats and the Hungarian Democratic Forum one.
Ropi, this doesn't sound good. Can you elaborate on the Hungarian neofascist party?

They cover Sweden, Austria, and Belgium as well. And there are a number of links to other stories on the election.

2 comments:

  1. Continuing to learn about the EU, its history and law. The European Parliament is quite another political creation: it's genratively supranational--not federal, not unitary, not confederacy. It's a multi-tribal-proto-sovereign 'nation' by use of treaties. Interesting that the EU has a parliament at all, really. So much history resisting union while necessity urges its realization. Having just seen Star Trek, I just have to say it ... Fascinating! You'd love it as a PA guy.

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  2. Well, some of my friends (f. ex: Komaja) and classmates voted for them. They got a bit more than 14% almost the same as the governing party. However I wouldn't call them neo-fascists. They are very radical but they are far from Adolf Hitler's fascism.

    They used up the tensions of the crisis and tensions between the ethnic groups to be popular. However their EU leading figure is quite crazy. I don't really know about the others. On the topics of EU and America I even agree with their theories but I don't think they would work efficienty in the Parliament or they would work "too" efficiently.

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