Word: britain
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After resignations, a reshuffle and rebellion, few at the first meeting Tuesday morning of Gordon Brown's new cabinet can have felt too secure about their place at the table. Britain's Prime Minister among them. Hours after Labour slumped to third place in the European elections - it fared just as dismally in last week's local council votes - Brown fended off irate rebels at a closed-door meeting of party legislators Monday night billed as a showdown over the prime minister's future...
...none of that puts Brown in the clear. According to a poll published Tuesday in Britain's Independent newspaper, the opposition Conservatives - consistently double-digits ahead of Labour in recent opinion polls - would nonetheless fall six seats short of a majority in any general election with the genial Johnson as Labour's P.M. With Brown still at the helm, the Tories would romp home 74 seats to the good. More evidence of that nature - or defeat in either of the two tricky by-elections Labour faces in the coming months, following the resignation of a pair...
...Still, fallout from the prominence of fringe parties could be far-reaching. While Britain's first-past-the-post voting system at general elections mitigates against small parties, the euroskeptic Conservatives, for instance, will be left pondering how many of its supporters could in the future migrate to UKIP - and how it might keep them from doing so. The triumph of the BNP (along with seats for far-right parties from the Netherlands and Austria) will add to concerns that the economic downturn is fueling a move to fascist parties in some corners of Europe...
...most spectacular result was in the U.K., where beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party scraped a mere 15.7% of the national vote. It limped into third place behind the Conservative Party, with 28.5%, and the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) - campaigning to pull Britain out of the E.U. - which mustered 17.4% of the vote. (See pictures of Brown...
...campaigner Geert Wilders, came second to the ruling Christian Democrats with 17%, pushing the Labour Party into third place. Anti-Gypsy extremists in Hungary and Slovakia won seats. In Austria, two far-right parties earned 18%, while Finland's anti-immigrant True Finns won 10% of the vote. And Britain's UKIP, who won 13 of the 72 British seats despite having no members in the 646-member House of Commons, will be joined by two European Parliament newcomers: the far-right British National Party and Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru. (Read a TIME piece on the gains made...