Greg Lance - Watkins (Greg_L-W)
#0434* – UKIP vs True Finns – The EU,#0000* – TITLE!
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EUkip up
NOW
make
UKIP
electable!
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Hi,
an interesting reflection on True Finns and the effect on the EUro, The EUrozone & The EU as a result of the changes in Finnish politics where unlike UKIP in Britain True Finns have a credible leadership RELATIVE to the other parties on offer.
Sadly UKIP has no credible leadership when measured by any standards with its endless self demeaning denigartion unable to address facts or answer questions merely resorting to defamatory and childish gutter style attempts to bully and abuse their critics and other supporters who seek to try to clean up the party to one day make it electable.
Yes indeed True Finns had the advantage of PR voting but this endlessly has given rise to muddled coallitions as with Italy and no effective credible Government as PR does – favouring the failures and also rans against the achievers and the strategists as shown in that without a credible policy to their name and a largely fascist approach to a communist agenda by clever strategy and sound leadership even the Greens have managed to achieve a seat at Westminster.
True Finns achieved over 19% of the vote a figure aspired to but rarely achieved even in single seats by UKIP.
The Price of the Euro in Finland
The single currency is exacting ever-higher political and economic costs.
By MATS PERSSON
When European Union leaders forged their monetary union without a full political and economic merger, they gambled on two vital factors: That economic forces could be kept in check, and that national democracies could be managed.
Over the past 16 months, we have been reminded time and again exactly how big and how irresponsible those gambles were. Sunday’s was arguably the strongest reminder yet, courtesy of the anti-euro True Finns party that may hold the balance of power in the next Finnish government. Paris, Berlin and Brussels seem not to have factored Nordic populism into their grand plans for the euro. But ultimately the euro zone is about politics, and politics remain as local as they ever were.
In the run-up to Sunday’s polls, the True Finns strongly opposed a bailout for Portugal. Their promise to block any future transfers of Finnish money to rescue profligate European governments helped them win a spectacular 19% of the vote, compared to just over 4% in the last general election. That put them only slightly behind the largest group in parliament, the National Coalition Party, which won 20.4% of the vote, and behind the second-biggest Social Democrats by only a hair. By skillfully moving along the right-left political spectrum—acting as social democrats in nationalists’ clothing—the True Finns filled a vacuum in Finnish politics that stemmed from disillusionment with the traditional parties.Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
The True Finns’ success will not change European politics overnight, and the party may not even succeed in blocking Finland’s participation in future bailouts. But, irrespective of what we think of the True Finns, the election does highlight how powerfully a euro-zone crisis can contribute to shaping national politics. Euro bailouts were also an important issue in Slovakia’s elections last year, and helped to deliver a new governing coalition that refused to take part in Europe’s Greek bailout. That government only reluctantly kicked in later to help create the temporary bailout fund that euro leaders are now looking to replace after 2013.
This year the True Finns asked voters to consider the same question that Slovaks did last year: Why should they work harder and retire later to pay for the mistakes and wasteful habits of southern European governments? This “triple-A populism” has proven a powerful force in a number of countries with sparkling credit ratings, including Germany. Writ large, this weekend’s Finnish elections are a rebuke of one of the euro zone’s central, and fatal, conceits: that political ambition can trump economic and democratic realities.
For years, politicians as well as markets assured themselves that economies could share a single currency (and a single interest rate) despite having radically different levels of competitiveness and credit-worthiness, and even lacking centralized fiscal policies and proper labor-market mobility to compensate for economic divergences. Markets have now finally woken up to the fact that Greece and Germany are poles apart; it is time for EU leaders to do so as well. Ireland, Greece and Portugal have made all too clear that economic forces can rarely be predicted, let alone contained.
Some particularly federal-minded EU leaders took this as a pretext to push even harder for a full-fledged fiscal union. Former European Commission President Romano Prodi wrote in an op-ed in the Financial Times last May that “When the euro was born everyone knew that sooner or later a crisis would occur. . . . I was warning years ago that, through no one’s fault in particular, extraordinary events could occur that would force joint co-ordination of fiscal policies.”
That sentiment spurred EU leaders to take their next major gamble, which was even riskier than the first: They bet that once they did start to effect robust economic and political union, national voters and parliaments would play along and vote the “right” way. So last year, when the EU elites decided to break their own treaties and turn the euro zone into a de facto debt union, they forced taxpayers in some countries to take on the liabilities of foreign governments in other countries—without the possibility of voting these governments out of office.
But taxpayers are now showing signs of revolt. It is too early to tell how the results in the Finnish election will affect the ongoing bailout operation in Euroland. The True Finns could hugely complicate a Portuguese bailout, since use of the euro zone’s rescue package requires unanimity among participating governments and, by Finnish law, the Finnish parliament’s approval.
The True Finns and the Social Democrats, who want Portugal to restructure its debt rather than seek a bailout, together will occupy 81 out of 200 seats in the new Finnish parliament. Both could well form part of the next government alongside the National Coalition Party, which means that EU leaders are already looking for ways to circumvent Finnish democracy and persuade the True Finns to break their campaign promises.
Even if they succeed, EU leaders will still have to deal with the countries on the other end of the bailouts: Greece, Ireland and Portugal, whose voters are increasingly wary of EU-backed austerity measures. As much as taxpayers in rich countries don’t like to pay for other governments’ mistakes, voters in poor countries also don’t like being told what to do by people they never elected and can’t vote out of office.
Will EU politicians’ second gamble turn out as ill-judged as their first? Time will tell. But one thing is clear. The political price that European leaders are paying to keep their flawed project afloat continues to rise.
Mr. Persson is director of Open Europe, a London-based think tank.
To view the original Wall Street Journal Article CLICK HERE
To view Dr. Eric Edmond’s view on this issue CLICK HERE
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Why can’t UKIP emulate the True Finns?
THE PICTURE SAYS IT ALL!
I do believe had John Left Marta Andreasen fully in picture it might have been clearer as only being supported by his place people and liars and self seekers like his imported Spaniard Marta Andreasen are almost all that remains on his so called team!
& of course his determination to make prostitutes of his party by helping The EU with its policy to undemine National Politics by bribes to Pan EU Political Groups like Farage’s EFD Group prostituted for money to racists, xenophobes, reformers, anti Jewish that Farage now supports in Pan EU Politics speaks volumes of the man.
A performer of some merit but a leader bereft of talent or even basic ability as a leader.
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Ukip-vs-EUkip 