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Political developments in Europe have been fascinating, driven by a variety of things that have made Europe under great pressure. First of all, there’s a huge tension between the bureaucracy that exists in Britain, Brussels, which represents in theory, a European wide system that really represents the bureaucrats who run the European system doesn’t represent the people who have no direct impact on second, you have greater and greater strength in the nations where people like the Italians are the Greeks of the Hungarians resent the amount of power that Brussels have, and want to take power back to their local national systems, then you have the challenge of an economic problem. That’s very real. The objective reality is that the Americans have emphasized innovation, the Europeans have emphasized regulation. Well, in the long run, you create a lot more new products, a lot more wealth, a lot higher standard of living, if you’re innovating than if you’re regulating. And that’s begun to make the gap in European standard of living get bigger and bigger compared to what’s happening in the United States. Finally, European immigration stress is very different from the American system. The European systems to cultures don’t really accept outsiders very easily. The result is that when immigrants arrived, mostly Muslim, often from North Africa, or Syria, or parts of the East, or Somalia,
they don’t don’t get absorbed. And they develop their own neighborhoods. In Paris, for example, their entire areas that are called no go areas, because the police cannot go in there, unless they bring a huge amount of force with them. And those are now self governing entities, essentially, outside of French control. So you’re seeing all of these different things come to bear. And the results have been fascinating. In Italy, for example, you had the election of Giorgio Maloney, who, who ends up being very successful Prime Minister, and has really become I think, the most popular Prime Minister in modern times. At the same time, she’s basically on a very pro Italian, critical of Belgium, of Brussels, kind of approach. You also have seen places like Hungary, where you now have a government, which is very conservative, very nationalist, has basically fence the country and against any kind of immigration is actually also very pro Russian, which is a little troubling. And then you have some fascinating elections. There is a Danish poet. There’s a Dutch politician who has been running for years and years. Well, his party, which is a very strongly anti immigrant party, has gained a great deal of ground and is now much more important than it has ever been before.
Then you get to the three big areas, the Germans are in total disarray. The fact is that their governments basically incapable of functioning right now, because it is so split up in terms of who has power. At the same time.
The French have had a wild series of elections. President McCrone got tired of being attacked and yelled out for the right. He called a sudden snap election for the French Parliament. It’s a two round election. If you don’t get over 50% the first time, then you run a second time. And on the first round, the conservative wing did very, very well looked like they were going to be the dominant wing. In the second round a week later, all the other groups ganged up on them, and they lost ground considerably. But that put the left to socialist and even beyond socialist was the largest single block. So right now the French Parliament’s divided, with the socialist left being the largest group, microns moderates being the second largest group, and the conservatives have grown dramatically, but not enough to replace the other two. So France is going to be in turmoil. Finally, you get to
Great Britain. It is a mess.
After 14 years in government, the British Conservatives so mismanaged the economy, the politics and the culture that they were smashed. This is the worst election in the history of the British Conservative Party. Going back to 1832.
The Labour Party is winning a victory so large, they got 35% of the vote, but in a very fractured environment with the Conservative Party
In a brand new Reform Party, the Scottish nationalist party, a new Muslim party, all of them taking votes away, and then the classic liberal party, all of them took votes away. So labour came in first with 35%. But because of the British system, where if you come in first you win 35% It was a surprisingly big victory across constituency after constituency.
Labour will now have a majority so large that everybody agrees there’ll be in charge for at least the next 10 years. That’s how much things have changed in Europe. So we’ll have to keep watching because there’s a lot going on
