No doubt the usual suspects will be hugely enjoying the claim by Austria’s hard-right interior minister Elisabeth (Liesl) Prokop that 45 per cent of Muslims are “unwilling to integrate”. In fact, it’s more than a claim - as well as rhetoric, she’s got a “study” to support her election positioning. Unfortunately, the study still isn’t [...]

It never stops when your blog has to cover an entire continent. Hardly had the Italian left taken AFOE’s advice to get Giorgio Napolitano elected as president than the Clearstream scandal in France was getting out of hand, and nothing at all on the blog! Fortunately, at the moment the news from that quarter is [...]

The prospect of Sarkozy replacing Villepin as French Prime Minister has apparently been given a significant boost today, with a close aide of Sarkozy saying his boss could accept such an offer, provided he is allowed to carry out his (and not Chirac’s) political agenda.
Now, maybe this won’t come to pass (and I’ll argue below [...]

And so it begins. Back in Italy, the Left has comprehensively disrupted the Right’s systems by folding Massimo D’Alema’s candidacy (German link) and producing a surprise candidate, the 81-year old Democratic Leftie Giorgio Napolitano. The effect has been to split the Right coalition, with ex-cause célébre Rocco Buttiglione annoucing that his neo-Christian Democrats will back [...]

Well, this is a little late, but we ought to put on record that the fun-lovin’ minicaudillo’s fingers were eventually pried from the Italian prime ministership. As predicted, he went out with a considerable degree of low comedy, as the Italian senate struggled to elect a speaker largely because the Berlusconi side insisted [...]

For those of you who aren’t closely following British news (or are being distracted by your own national scandals), it looks like the Blair cabinet is an wee bit of trouble, after being hit by what the media called either “triple whammy” or “black Wednesday” :
Labour’s authority as a government was severely shaken [Wednesday] [...]

It’s a national holiday in Italy today, the anniversary of Liberation. So there was a suitably grand state ceremony at the Quirinal palace - the President’s residence - and, as tradition demands, a big demo for the Left to march through the streets, sing “Bella Ciao” until they get hoarse (well, hoarser, given how most [...]

For the first time since the fall of Communism, a national election in Hungary is not being followed by a change of government. Eszter points to a useful graphic from Népszabadság, a Bdapest daily newspaper, that shows the compositions of all of Hungary’s post-1989 parliaments. There’s an ebb and flow of parties (particularly the growth [...]

The European Union will soon have the world’s second-biggest amphibious warfare fleet. As well as the Royal Navy’s two LPDs (Landing Platform Dock - what the RN used to call an “assault ship”, basically a ship with a large dock in the stern, a shitload of radio gear, a heli deck, and space for several [...]

Since the withdrawal of the CPE and the resulting collateral damage to Dominique de Villepin, not to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s unexpected appearance as a unity figure at the height of the crisis, it’s rapidly being promulgated as conventional wisdom that France “is ungovernable”/refuses to “reform”/cannot be “reformed”. There is only one problem with this discourse, [...]