Word: center
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...show on TV than the showing at the ballot box. Indeed, after so much huffing and puffing on the campaign trail, the results from weekend voting left the political landscape in Italy mostly unchanged. Berlusconi's People's Freedom Party notched 35% of the electorate, safely ahead of the center-left challengers but short of the runaway victory the 72-year-old billionaire Berlusconi had hoped...
...agreed with, voters are turning their backs on those parties that now seem to have been so prophetic. "There is an existential crisis for the socialists. Voters do not want socialism, they want a market system that works," says Corien Wortmann-Kool, who was re-elected for the Dutch center-right CDA party. "But the socialists are still rooted in the 20th century. They have not yet broken away from their ideological tradition of opposing capitalism...
...President Nicolas Sarkozy is deeply unpopular in France, his UMP party saw its vote rise to 27.7% from the 16.6% it garnered at the last European elections in 2004, while the Socialist Party slumped from 28.9% in 2004 to 16.5% this time. In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's center-right coalition surged 6.9% to secure 35% of the vote, ahead of the center-left opposition at 26%. Spain's governing Socialists slipped 4% to 38.5%, behind the opposition Popular Party at 42.2%, while Portugal's ruling Socialists suffered a stunning collapse in support, by 18 points...
...center left was not the only loser in the elections. The Parliament itself saw its credibility suffer further as voter turnout fell to a record low of 43.1%, compared with 45.5% in 2004. (For the Parliament's first direct elections in 1979, turnout was a remarkable 61.99%). This came despite a gargantuan effort to fight apathy through poster campaigns, television ads and YouTube initiatives...
...even with the growing support for the fringe, the Parliament has a distinctly conservative hue. With votes in several countries still being counted, the Parliament's loose family of center-right parties, the European People's Party, can provisionally claim 267 MEPs out of the 736-seat assembly. It is followed by the center-left group, the Party of European Socialists with 159 and the centrist Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe with...