Last month I posted about the elections in Slovakia. Robert Fico’s “Smer” party — leftish nationalist-populists — had beaten the center-right technocrats.
Well, Fico and Smer have formed a government. And it’s… interesting.
They chose two coalition partners: the right-wing hyper-nationalist, vaguely racist Slovak Nationalist Party (SNS), and the aging ex-Communists of Vladimir Meciar’s [...]

They had Parliamentary elections last week. Nobody much noticed, but,
1) The voting was conducted in good order and — according to international observers — was, for the most part, fair and without irregularities;
2) The opposition won a fairly clear victory; and,
3) The government promptly acknowledged the opposition victory, and is handing [...]

Well, it looks like one of the questions from this post may have been answered indirectly. It now matters little whether or not the Clearstream affair is ever cleared up, as some of the people most responsible for it have anyway been disgraced. Since the last post, the only real news on the Clearstream story [...]

It seems that this morning Dutch PM Jan Peter Balkenende is visiting the Queen to signal the resignation of the cabinet. The smallest of the three parties in the centre-right government, D66 with six seats, has signaled that it would not continue to support the coalition if Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk retains her portfolio. [...]

Romania’s PM Tariceanu announced yesterday that he wants to withdraw Romania’s troops from Iraq.
Right now here are about 900 Romanian soldiers there — one full battalion, with the catchy name of “The Red Scorpions”. They’re deployed in the Al-Nasyria area. They don’t do combat operations. There’s an intelligence team and some de-miners. [...]

I’ve been surprised at the lack of uproar over the discovery that the CIA has been data mining SWIFT transfer archives. I suppose it’s because this is far from the first troubling secret breech of the right to privacy by the Bush administration, and most people - the ones that don’t have large sums [...]

Slovakia had elections this weekend. They don’t seem to have attracted much attention, but I think they’re worth a quick look.
Short version: a center-right government that was committed to controversial social and economic reforms got thrown out in favor of a left-wing populist.
Now, depending on what corner of the political spectrum you come from, [...]

Well here in sunny Catalonia we don’t have a fooball team of our own right now, so maybe that’s why we chose this precise moment to hold a referendum about our future.
Now the first thing to get straight is that despite all the direst predictions, Spain is still here the morning after the big vote, [...]

If you’re ever in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, you’ll want to swing by the Government building.
(It’s called the Government building because, well, that’s where the government is. The Parliament, the Prime Minister, the President, and half a dozen or so government agencies are all squashed into one huge building downtown. It’s sort of [...]

It looks like Europe has a new country.
As of 6:00 am this morning, with over 99% of the ballots counted, it appears that the “out” votes have just barely won in Montenegro. Secession from Serbia required a 55% supermajority; the unofficial, not-quite-final count has 55.2% of the voters approving.
Now, in a jurisdiction the size [...]