Word: socialists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their electoral sweep of power Sunday night with a a decisive victory in second round legislative polling but fell significantly short of the "tsunami" that had been expected to lift President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) a to a record majority in parliament. The Socialist Party (PS) blunted Sarkozy's expected tidal wave victory with a better than expected showing. Still, with conservatives dominating the presidency, legislature and government - and given Sarkozy's promise to swiftly push through sweeping reform - there's little doubt French society will soon will be prodded to a depth...
...Despite the optimism of Di Rupo and Reynders, the favorites for the Prime Minister's job remain Flemish: Christian Democrat leader Yves Leterme; Socialist Party leader Johan Vande Lanotte; and Flemish Liberal leader and outgoing Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt...
...Sunday's national elections, they are itching to smash the Flemish grip on the top job. A victory by the leading French-speaking candidate, Elio di Rupo, would make history not only because of his language, but as Europe's first openly gay Prime Minister. As leader of the Socialist Party (PS) in Wallonia - and also the region's minister-president - Di Rupo, 55, is the heavyweight of Francophone politics. And the fact that his origins are Italian, Belgium's second-largest immigrant community after Moroccans, adds a third dimension to the identity challenge represented by his candidacy...
...gloves-off campaigning style of the conservatives seems to be working. Leading Socialist candidates are already talking more about how they'll regroup and reform their party in opposition than about the possibility of victory. And the shrill tone of the UMP campaigning also appears designed to counter any tendency to not bother to vote this time among Sarkozy supporters lulled by his commanding victory in the Presidential race. Although projections indicate France won't equal the stunning 84% participation rate in the Presidential poll, abstention should drop below the 30% barrier for the first time in a legislative election...
...became the youngest Archbishop of Canterbury in 200 years. "And," wrote one observer, "perhaps the cleverest," a man who had quickly established himself as one of Anglicanism's most gifted preachers and probably its pre-eminent theologian. He was a self-professed "hairy lefty," a Christian socialist arrested in a 1985 protest at a U.S. air base in England, who now criticizes the Iraq war. And he once also had a controversial stance on the theology of sexuality. In 1989 he delivered a lecture to Britain's Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement in which he stated: "If we are looking...