So Serbia had parliamentary elections yesterday.
Short version: could have been better, could have been much worse. There will be a new government, but probably not much will change.
A bit more below the flip.

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A Fistful of Euros is a weblog. Its purpose is to provide a venue for informed commentary on European politics and culture from a pan-European perspective.

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David Weman
A [...]

Well, our Neelie is back in the headlines (here, here, here, or here ).
Personally I don’t really see the issue, I think she can express her opinions if she wants to. What intrigued me rather more was the EUPolitix headline on the story.
Dutch EU chief backs ‘ultra-liberal’ Merkel

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Clay Risen has a perceptive article in Slate today, warning non-German observers that Angela Merkel (Gerd Schr?der’s likely successor) is no Margaret Thatcher. But embedded in that article is this astounding sentence:
[T]he CDU … is actually an alliance between the more free-market-oriented Christian Democrats, from which Merkel hails, and the more economically liberal Bavarian Christian [...]

Via Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber, an interesting article by Matthew Tempest in Spiegel Online (in English) comparing the rather contrasting fortunes of the German and British Green Parties. Both were founded at around the same time (the article does make an error in saying the Ecology Party renamed itself as the Green Party in [...]

Like most numbers of the Spectator, the festive, XL-sized holiday edition is marred by the presence of Mark Steyn. But don’t let that put you off, there’s some good stuff there as well. And one of the better bits is an essay by Prof. Norman Stone on Turkey (Potential EU Accession of) (reg. req.).
For the [...]

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

Book Review:
The Tainted Source
by John Laughland
A while back, I discovered that my great-grandfather’s estate in Ukraine, Apanlee, figures in a novel which is something of a favourite among neo-Nazis and Aryan supremacists. This led me to a number of websites that I wouldn’t regularly have frequented, including the Zundelsite and Stormfront’s webpage. There [...]