Mark Byron

Making Belarus Look Good

Interesting news day, with a lot of interesting things happening. Some items, like the Russia-Belarus oil spat, might get under people's radar.

Russia raised Belarus' natural gas prices, then Belarus raised transit taxes on the oil heading from Russia to the rest of Europe. Russia refused to pay, so Belarus started taking the tax in-kind out of the pipeline. Now Russia has stopped sending oil down the pipeline.

The Europeans have a stockpile of oil and the Russians do have a secondary pipeline through Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians had a similar pissing match a year ago when Russia raised prices and Ukraine retaliated with taking "five-finger discounts" from their Russia-to-Europe pipeline.

Belarus has one of the more obnoxious dictatorships going; President Lukashenko has few friends outside of Moscow and even the Kremlin seems to have had its fill. It's hard to make him look good, but Putin and friends are managing to do that.

Tweede Birds

I taught I taw a hung parliament!

The Dutch had their election yesterday, and it looks very much like a German-style grand coalition might be in the offing. The three main parties of the right have 72 seats (Christian Democrats 41, the libertarian VVD 22 and the nativist-libertarian Freedom Party 9) and the three main parties of the left have 65 (Labor 32, Socialist 26 Green 7). With 150 seats at stake, you need 76 seats to command a majority in the lower house or Tweede Kamer.

A Christian Union party that's socially conservative but on the left on economics got 6 seats and a Party for Animals got 2. An American-style-liberal  D66 party got 3 and a very theocon Political Reformed Party (SGP in Dutch) got 2. I needed Wikipedia to finish off the roster; none of the main news pieces mentioned the last two.

Coalition formation could be interesting. D66 has been part of both center-left and center-right coalitions in the past, so a package of the Christian Democrats, the VVD, Geert Wilders' Freedom Party (largely picking up Pim Fortuyn's spot in the Dutch body politic, as I predicted in 2004) and D66 would be feasible and would get them up to 75 seats.

Back in 2004, I predicted that "the right wouldn't add up to 50% without Wilders' List." It adds up to 50% on the nose with it, if you count D66 as right.

That's largely the current coalition of CD PM Jan Peter Balkenende. If they could get the support of the SGP, who has refused to be part of the cabinet in the past, they could get a very slim majority. However, that's a lot of people to keep happy, including three different flavors of libertarian and an SGP that makes James Dobson look like a flaming secularist.

The job for the left's a lot harder. To get a full center-left coalition, they'd have to get everyone with any left-leanings on board. A Labor-Socialist-Green-Animal-D66-Christian Union-Fritz the Wonder Hippo package limps in with 76 seats. Oh, Fritz didn't get any seats, sorry.

The path of least resistance seems to be some sort of centrist coalition of Labor, the Christian Democrats and one other party, most likely either Christian Union or D66. That's the path that the European MSM would prefer if they can't get a liberal coalition.

However, I'd expect to see Balkenende try to bring D66 back onside; they walked out of the cabinet in June, forcing this election. The government has made a bow to the Wilders vote by banning the wearing of burkas, so they'd need D66 on board and the SPG to vote for the new government to stay in power.

If that gambit doesn't work, the next step would be a grand coalition of some sort with Labor.

I deed! I deed see a hung parliament! They'll likely be back to the polls before the US gets its next president, since none of the feasible coalitions are all that stable.

Raging Moderates

The European body politic moved a notch more to the right, as a center-right (at least by their standards) won the Swedish elections today; the Moderate Party and their coalition partners got 48% to the Social Democratic-led coalition's 46%. It's an interesting body politic when the right-of-center coalition is Moderate, Liberal and Center, along with the Christian Democrats.

Of course, liberal in European (or most of the rest of the world) politics translates more to libertarian-conservative in a US context; for instance, the right-of-center Aussie government has their Liberal party as the senior partner.

The Moderate coalition "promises to cut both employer taxes and unemployment benefits." The Swedish economy is growing OK, but unemployment is higher than folks would like.

The Social Democrats have been the ruling party for all but a decade since WWI. It's not quite at a strangle-hold level like Mexico's PRI or the Japanese Liberal Democrats had, but it's close. When you couple that with conservative gains in Germany, a conservative coalition in the Netherlands and a new Greek conservative government, the Social Democrats are struggling; Spain and Italy are the few bright points for socialists in the last few years.

It's not a resounding tsunami of conservatism; the German government is a grand coalition of Christian Democrat and Social Democrat and the 2% is Sweden isn't exactly a landslide (compaired to Mexico, it is), but the big-government market socialism model seems to be opened up to free-market tweakings by much of the European electorate.

Edifier du Jour-Proverbs 23:4-5(ESV)

⁴Do not toil to acquire wealth;    
be discerning enough to desist.
⁵When your eyes light on it, it is gone,    
for suddenly it sprouts wings,    
flying like an eagle toward heaven.

That's a verse that runs headlong into the American Dream. We all seem to be bred to want a better car, a bigger house, a better-paying job, fancier food and all the other bling-bling. We've got the Keeping Up with the Joneses Jones.

How do you kick that habit? God can serve as not only a good alternative, but a better alternative to rampant materialism.

 

What's Italian for "Hanging Chad"

Interesting results from the Italian elections; it looks like the Union coalition of the left just squeaked by PM Berlusconi's House of Freedoms coalition of the right, 49.8-49.7; Berlusconi's calling for a recount. If everything holds up, Union leader (and former EU boss) Romano Pradi will take over as PM later this spring.

Berlusconi's been an outspoken friend of the US and of free markets, so the European left will be crowing about nudging out one of their worst pains. There may well have been some hanky-panky with the balloting, but it's very plausible that any ballot corruption could come from both sides.

The US doesn't have a monopoly on close, divisive elections.

Secular Cardinal Sins

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the worse case of foot-in-mouth disease since James Watt. He'd sound like an Onion piece were it not that he was heading up a regional power with the resources to try to wipe Israel off the map, especially if they get a nuke in the not-to-distant future.

The most Oniony of his ideas was his idea of moving Israel to Europe. You want to elbow aside the nascent caliphates of Berlin and Paris?

Lately, he's been in Holocaust-denial mode. Let me be clear that there's way too much evidence to the contrary to entertain Ahmadinejad's theory, but he does have a grain of truth in this paragraph-

"If someone were to deny the existence of God... or prophets and religion, they would not bother him. However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews' massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can[.]"

It's cool to be anti-tradition in Europe, especially anti-Christian tradition. However, Fascism and Nazism are the devils of secular Europe, and the Holocaust is their greatest sin. The secular left of Europe may be almost as anti-Jewish as Ahmadinejad, but they can't absolve their secular Devil of his sin. Holocaust-denial is one of the greatest heresies of the secular European faith.

Anti-Christian heresies are strongly encouraged, but don't you dare try and mess with the bad reputation of their Devil.

The Autoboomer Next Door

Interesting piece on a Belgian woman who became an autoboomer in Iraq. A picture of a younger Ms. Muriel Degauque that Drudge had up reminded me more than a bit of the late-70s Family era Kristy McNichol. Yes, the nose and the eyes are a bit different, but they've got that same hairdo.

The story has her marrying a Muslim guy of Moroccan extraction and becoming a hard-core jihadi; the converts are often more devout than folks who grew up in the faith. Her husband was also killed in Iraq as a would-be autoboomer, although he was shot before being able to explode himself.

That says a lot about racial profiling and how it won't always work. Yes, most of the terrorists will look foreign, but we also need to keep our eyes open for folks who look like the boy or girl next door. Your standard-issue conservative would gripe if they saw this first-runner-up in a Kristy McNichol look-alike contest getting the full treatment when boarding an airplane, yet she was a terrorist.

This is going to be a problem for Europeans in the years to come; as Muslims integrate themselves into European culture (they're rather ghettoized, as we've seen in France, but some integration is happening), you'll see quite a few native Europeans convert to Islam. The converts will be able to fly under radar and get into places that Muslim-looking folks won't, for they'll be under less scrutiny.

Even if we discount Islamic terrorism from American jihadis, remember that not all terrorism is Islamic. When he wasn't in mountain-man mode, the Unibomber was a UofM math grad student and would have looked fairly normal. Tim McVeigh might have slipped in and out of your grocery store without getting a second look.

I'm not overly against giving Arab-looking folks a little more scrutiny, but it's not going to solve the problem totally.

Chirac's Southern Strategy

Earlier today, I was making fun of President Chirac, making his most recent speech out to be a combination of Jimmy Carter's "malaise speech" and LBJ's Great Society; he used the word malaise (which Carter didn't actually say in the speech in question) and proposed a works program for immigrant youth. I may have missed the more apt political metaphor; that of Nixon's Southern Strategy. Just replace George Wallace with Le Pen and add water.

The news over the wire today is that France's lower house passed some emergency power extensions-

The state of emergency laws, allowing local authorities to impose curfews, conduct house-to-house searches and ban public gatherings, date from the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s.

Fast forward six decades and the Algerians are at it again, this time in the blue-collar suburbs of Paris (if I could have some poetic license to equate the immigrant youth to Algerians, who make up a plurality of the youth in question). Chirac is responding as a  circa late 60s reactionary like Nixon or Mayor Daley. Daley's malaprop from the convention riots of '68 about the police being there to preserve disorder comes to mind.

In the 1968 campaign and in the years to follow, Nixon ran on a law-and-order platform; that was read as being anti-black-rioting/activism to rednecks in the south and north (remember that Wallace won the Michigan Democratic primary in 1972 before getting shot) without being racist per se. Republicans proceeded to wean blue collar conservatives away from the Democratic party on both anti-communism and law-and-order issues, getting Wallace Democrats to become Regan Democrats a decade later.

What Chirac is trying to do is to keep losing support to nativist parties like the National Front of Jean Marie Le Pen; the National Front is often categorized as far-right, but they're more like combining the worst features of Ralph Nader and David Duke (Buchanan is often used here, but Le Pen's far more openly bigoted than Pitchfork Pat). By playing the law-and-order card, Chirac can crack down on the immigrants without being overtly racist.

That's about the only thing that Chirac can do. The statist economy that encourages unemployment and discourages new employment (by making it hard to fire someone) is too entrenched for Chirac to tackle; the EU constitution went down not because they thought the EU was too socialist but because it wasn't socialist enough. The French government isn't ready to expand the economy to the extent that they'd suck up all those unemployed Arab youths; to do so would most likely require retooling the economy along the dreaded Anglo-Saxon model. That would lose votes to the Socialists and other leftist groups.

They're also unlikely to go to the mat against anti-Arab discrimination, getting people to actually hire. That would mean losing votes to the National Front.

What Chirac's left with on a political basis is the Southern Strategy of Nixon; unfortunately, that's the best the French body politic can come up with. There isn't a non-ethnocentric right to challenge Chirac, and the Socialists wouldn't help matters in the immigrant suburbs much if any; they might get some make-work jobs going in that direction, but they'd have to watch their right flank if the blancs got tired of paying higher taxes to keep the Arabs happy.

What France needs is a growing economy and more tolerance of immigrants. None of the major French parties can do the former and only the Socialists have an outside shot at bringing about the latter.

It's going to get far worse before it gets better. Let's pray otherwise, but it doesn't look pretty.

Blair's Slow Goodbye

I didn't get around to chiming in on the vote last week where there was a Labour-left rebellion against the government on a habeas corpus bill. The Blair government wanted to be able to expand the time that they could hold terrorism suspects without charges from 15 to 90 days; a block of 49 Labourites along with both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats blocked the bill. A modified version allowing for 28 days in gaol without charges was passed.

From an American standpoint, even that seems a bit much. IIRC, the police are only allowed three business days before they have to bring charges; the lawyers in the Peanut Gallery are encouraged to chime in to correct me.

However, that vote wasn't a vote of confidence; such a defeat on a budget bill would trigger a change in government. The same block of renegades are moving to block a education bill, which might see the Tories propping up Tony Blair.

Conservative leader Michael Howard raised the prospect that Mr Blair may be able to rely on Tory support to get flagship policies through Parliament.

"It won't be me making the decisions but my view would be - if what the government brings forward is in the interests of the country we should support them," he said.

Tory leadership hopeful David Cameron also told the BBC's Politics Show he would "resist the temptation" to vote against the government purely to inflict further defeats on Mr Blair."I think the temptation to try and bring down the government by voting against something with which you fundamentally agree, I think that is a mistake," he said.

Mr Blair has admitted he faces a "rough ride" but told the News of the World that he and the Cabinet had agreed to "continue doing what is right, not what is easy".

Howard is stepping aside after the Tories didn't do all that well in this springs' elections. However, the Tories might be better off with a wounded Blair than a new election that might bring about a more left-wing Labour leader in coalition with the further-left Liberal Democrats.

If the rebels Labourites are a minority within the party, a NuLab-Conservative coalition might limp along for a while, for neither the Blair camp or the Conservative camp would want a new election that could strengthen both the Liberal Democrats and the left wing of Labour. Blair's pledged to step aside as Prime Minister in the near future; likely successor Gordon Brown is a notch to Blair's left but not as left as the rebels.

Will the Labour party allow Blair to be part of a de-facto coalition government with the Conservatives? We shall see.

Return of the Kingston Trio

Darn. Four glasses of Diet Coke at our meeting with Pastor Tim and his wife this evening and I'm more wired than a transformer. Tim Horton's continues it's role as the front company for Canadian World Domination by providing nice food and drink and friendly service at a fair price, not even complaining when I went back for thirds and forths on pop.

I'll write some while I put some blood into the caffeine system.

_____

They're talking about a Jamaican government in Germany (thanks to Patrick Carver for the link). Well, that's one possibility in a messy split-decision Sunday. That's a joke on the colors of a proposed Christian Democrat (black)-Free Democrat (yellow) and Green coalition. Here's an odd quote that might have made more sense in German-

"We are interested in content," Greens co-leader Claudia Roth said on ARD television. "We are not interested just in governing, we are interested in politics."

I think that last might have translated better as "policy." Any coalition is going to have to go light on the free-market reforms, for at least one of the left-of-center parties will be in the next government; none of them seem to have too many closet supply-siders.

The CDU and the Greens might actually agree to have a more pro-nuke-plant policy.
Do I see that right; the German Greens are pro-nuke-plant? Once you divorce nuclear weapons and the leftist knee-jerk opposition to same from the equation, nuclear power is the cleanest power available, if you can avoid a Chernobyl and find a good place to stash the waste; that's something most folks can agree on.

The Free Democrats don't want to be part of the Green-Social Democrat coalition, both major parties have disavowed the largely-ex-Communist Left Party, and there's a bit too much bad blood to make a grand coalition possible. That might make the CDU-FD-Green Kingston Trio a possibility.

Sausages and Coalitions

You don't want to see either being made. However, Germany is now stuck the wurst kind of politics. The center-right Christian Democrats got the most seats in today's elections, just edging out the Social Democrats (35% to 34%), but the left has the majority of the seats. The normal center-right coalition of the CDU and Free Democrats got 45% of the vote, while the ruling Social Democrat(a.k.a SPD) -Green coalition got 42%. The monkey-wrench comes in the form of the hard socialist Left party, a coalition of old Communists and hard-cord SPDs; they got 9%.

The CDU had a double-digit lead about a month ago, but populist rhetoric helped bring the SPD back, coming in a close second but covering the spread and denying a center-right coalition a majority. Thus, Germany's likely stuck with Chancellor Schroeder in power for a while, either with the Lefties joining the current SPD-Green coalition, or with a "grand coalition" with the CDU.

That's going to leave German politics vulnerable to quick changes. Expect another election in a year or two.

____

Also, the wurstmeisters are at it in New Zealand; here's the official election page. The ruling Labour party got a bare plurality and needs to reel in some minor parties to form a coalition; a coalition of Greens, Progressive (singular, they have one seat) and Maori (the indigenous folks of New Zealand) just add up to 50%; they'll need one more seat for a majority.

Attacks-Free IRA

The wearers of the orange will believe it when they see it, but the IRA says they're shutting down and handing in their weapons. They're not going to bring the North into Ireland by force. If they keep up the fight, the natural response of the UK is to respond and the natural response of the Protestants is to resist. If they stop fighting, the Ulsterites might opt to join the rest of Ireland willingly in a generation or two.

Yes, I could see where Ian Paisley IV might prefer being ruled by Dublin than by London by 2050. That's 45 years from now. However, 45 years ago, JFK's Catholicism was a hot-button issue with rednecks  in the US; today, their descendants gladly vote for conservative Catholics as an alternative to secularized nominal Protestants.

Let's fast forward trends in the British Isles. Ireland stays Catholic, probably a bit more secular than it is now, but still with solid moral values by European standards. The non-NI part of the UK becomes more multicultural and more secular; the devout Ulsterites will seem like a fish out of water in a post-Christian Britain if they don't already.

If you add a more vibrant Irish economy, there may come a point a few decades down the line where the Orangemen might opt to cast their lot with a Christian Ireland rather than a post-Christian UK. In the US, our politics has become one of whether you go to church rather than where you go, with nominal believers tending to vote Democratic and active believers tending to vote Republican. Might the same happen in Ireland?

Yes, there's a lot more bad blood over the Troubles than there was in trans-Tiber relations in the US, so that proposal is a bit of a stretch. However, it's a plausible one.

There's one problem from Sinn Fein's standpoint; they might not want a merger when it does come, since it may well move Ireland to the right. Sinn Fein's a leftist party, and the Orange folks tend to be folks of the right.

Heath Musings

Interesting obit on former British PM Edward Heath, who reminds me a lot of moderate Republican "RINOs" like former Michigan Gov. Bill Milliken. Like the RINOs who still haven't recovered from Reagan and the conservative takeover of the GOP, Heath had no love for Margaret Thatcher (who elbowed Heath aside as Tory leader in the mid 70s) and her free market politics; Heath never read the British equivalent of the 11th Commandment and freely bashed Thatcher from the back benches.

Heath was Prime Minister during the early 70s, and dealt with the economic problems of the era much like Nixon did; floating the pound and putting in wage and price controls. One interesting difference between Heath and Nixon is that there wasn't an analog to Nixon's "Southern Strategy;" one of the bullet points on Heath's bio was dropping nativist Tory Enoch Powell from the Conservative leadership in 1968 after an noted anti-immigrant "rivers of blood" speech.

I decided to take a look at that speech; being an American grade schooler at the time, it didn't show up on my radar until now. Here's the "money graf"

...the immigrant communities can organize to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.

I hadn't heard of Powell before this 2002 story on the 100 greatest Britons. Methinks that after 7/7, that Powell speech might resonate a bit better than it did before. One can only hope that it doesn't provoke Klan-like violence against darker-skinned Brits.

Leads Lead to Leeds

Before today, I would associate Leeds with soccer, hearing reports of them playing Arsenal or Manchester United. Today, it's in the news as the HQ of the 7/7¹ bombers.

All four of the bomb suspects were born in England. Fifth column, anyone? Tighter borders only help if the bad guys aren't already here.

West Yorkshire sounds like a quaint place, home of a "pudding" that's more of a cake, not a jihadi breeding ground. However, the UK has quite a few Pakistani and Indian Muslim immigrants, many of whom have been in England long enough to have British-born children and grandchildren.

I've seen stats that about 1% of British Muslims are al Qaeda sympathizers; that's not a big percentage, but when you've got about 1.5M Muslims, that gives us 15,000 potential autoboomers.

I'm not sure how accurate this thought is, but there seems to be a small percentage of any young male population that's going to look for a violent solution to their problems. In the US, you'll have a small handful of white-supremacist types; in Europe, you'll have a larger handful of skinheads looking to bash the scapegoat foreigners. Among European Muslims, those same angry young men can turn to a literalist reading of the Koran and go on the jihad.

The hard-core Muslim is more dangerous, since they have religious fervor that the skinheads generally lack; yes, some of the skinheads have a warped theology a la "Christian Identity," but that's a minority. The jihadis have a warped theology a la Allah.

It's not going away any time soon. The answer seems to be getting the angry young men to buy into the socio-economic system, whether it be a gangsta, a skinhead, or a prospective jihadi. If they don't they'll resort to violence; the Muslim variety just seems to be the most virulent of the bunch.

¹As they noted over in Samizdata, it nice that it's 7/7, so we don't have to worry whether it's American-style month first or European-style day first

The Nothing in Common Market

I'm dating myself pretty well, going back two names for the EU, but that is the core problem facing the EU-philes as they regroup after losing a referendum on the EU constitution in France yesterday.

What do the 25 member states of the EU want to admit to having in common other than being on the same continent. A common Christian heritage? No, they don't want to admit that. A common Enlightenment heritage? That's stretching it; it may be true, but it's a rather flimsy foundation to try and build a state upon.

ETA or Something Moor?

I've been busy; I'm just now getting to the Madrid bombings yesterday. What happened is clear- three train bombings that claimed 198 lives.

Who did it? Whenever there's terrorism in Spain, the finger gets reflexively pointed to the Basque-nationalist terror group ETA; the northern region has a very distinct language and culture, and a long-standing independent streak. However, this didn't fit ETA's MO of attacking government facilities; they've usually stayed away from mass civilian targets, IIRC. It smells more like al Qaeda than ETA, given al Qaeda's love of simultanious attacks. Adding to that lead is that a car with bomb equipment and Arabic tapes was found, pointing towards a possible al Qaeda link.

ETA? al Qaeda? Both? That last is the scary part. The two don't have much in common except they don't like the Spanish government; the Spanish were on board with the US coalition for the invasion of Iraq. Could ETA have linked up with al Qaeda?

Stranger things have happened, like a Japanese terror group staging an 1972 attack in Tel Aviv in support of the Palestinians; the PFLP contracted out the slaughter. However, it's far too early to assume such a connection, or who actually did the dirty deed yesterday.

[Update-11AM-Jane Galt had a far better piece up yesterday.]

British Hit List

 Many Bloggers have had fun with this BBC list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time. Greg Hlatky has a good list of so-so inclusions and famous people in history slighted. I'm glad they don't have my namesake, Mr. "mad, bad and dangerous to know." This was done of 30,000 British people, so you should expect some historic illiteracy.

However, I've got some nits to pick with Greg's take of Thomas Paine and William Wallace. Would an comparable American list include Robert E. Lee? I think so.

The inclusion of Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, Boy George and Johnny Rotten are disturbing, but I could see Springsteen and Madonna or (get the barf bag) Brittany Spears cracking such an American list.

David Beckham is the Michael Jordan of English soccer, and wouldn't His Airness get on an US list. Champion rower Steve Redgrave is an odd pick-I hadn't heard of him before this.

J.K. Rowling is in, but Stephen King and Tom Clancy would have a shot at a US list.

There are some people I don't get either, but have been part of their culture, such as comic Eric Morecambe and anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell

Politics and Nationalism in Europe

 I'm still digesting the news of the last 30 hours, of the Chirac whupping of Le Pen and the assassination of Fortuyn. Early information is pointing to a native-Dutch killer of Fortuyn, which will soften the blow. Even so, Fotruyn backers were in an ugly mood, doing a good chunk of rioting tonight. There are a lot of underlying issues that have just begun to truly pop up on the political radar in Europe that the main parties and the elites have wished away until now.

The first that has come to light is that of immigration and assimilation of immigrants. With a low birth rate, Europe needs to have a large number of young people come in to make up for the birth dearth. Europe doesn't have a tradition of being a place of immigration so there is no Lady Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor ..." ethic to counteract the siren song of nativism. A stagnant economy due in part to a more socialist economic system will leave the children of immigrants feeling left out and the children of natives feeling that the immigrants are getting all the jobs and draining their tax money. Just like the KKK and other white-power groups target poor whites, poor natives are targets for the nativists and the more ugly neo-fascist groups.

A large majority of the European immigrants are from Islamic countries and they have been slow to assimilate into their new countries, unlike the nominally Catholic Latinos and the spiritually unthreatening Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants that make up the core of American immigration. It isn't so much a Christian-Islam fight but a Islam-secular fight. Foruyn was bashing Islam not in the name of Christianity but in the name of Dutch secularism. French battles to ban Islamic dress in schools is also an effort to enforce secularism.

Immigration isn't the only problem in Europe. European centralization is a problem that the elite leadership doesn't want to talk about. Many people want to move away from a centralized Europe and may look to Euroskeptic parties to get their voice heard. Le Pen and Haider play to this localist sentiment while the general trend on the continent is towards more centralization. These parties can also rail against high tax rates, pointing out that even the main "conservative" parties are more economically liberal than the American Democrats.

Fotruyn was more Jesse Ventura than Jesse Helms, using a similar bare-knuckle libertarianism to get things rolling. A party that wants to cut taxes, scale back the reach of the EU and focus on better assimilating existing immigrants and slowing down the acquisition of new immigrants will have a big spot in the political ecology. This can be done without going the route of the bigot. The Tories are close to picking up this mantle, as are the Christian Democrats in Germany under Edmund Stoiber.

In France, the main parties haven't gotten the message of the mad-as-hell right quite yet. If the successor to Le Pen had a bit less bigot in him, they could compete with the Gaulist RPF for a spot in the run-offs on a more regular basis. If the RPF is smart, they will lean to the right and play to the Le Pen vote with a more skeptical view of Europe and a bit tighter view on immigration and assimilation, doing an analog what the Republican party in the US did in the 70s to woo the Wallace vote by stressing law-and-order and being against black militancy without being significantly racist.

The fun part will be watching the proportional representation countries and how new coalition governments will take shape. A strong nativist/nationalist party that gets 15-20% of the vote could force the center-right party to choose between them or the local center-left social democrats as their main partner in government. This is a unstated motive in the left's bashing of people like Haider. If the nationalists are persona non grata, then you're left with a center-left grand coalition of continued big government. In Austria, Haider's Freedom Party got 28%(IIRC), making a center-left coalition hard to pull off and leading to them becoming part of the government. The Fortuyn party might play a similar role, with the left's cries of intolerance being muted by the gunshots of their own guys.