RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/european-elections-deepen-divisions-in-national-capitals-11558960543

The outcome of the weekend’s European Union elections threatened a fresh period of instability in the bloc, with some countries set for early elections and coalition governments in Italy and Germany facing deeper strains.

As final results trickled in Monday, there was relief in Brussels that the vote didn’t yield a broad anti-EU nationalist surge. The Greens performed particularly strongly and pro-European lawmakers are set to form a clear majority in the new European Parliament.

Still, the EU faces continued political volatility and the results in many countries—including the departing Britain—suggested voters remain disillusioned and divided.

“The electorate is crying out for change and is therefore volatile—preferring to back new insurgents rather than the status quo parties that have been around for decades,” said Mark Leonard, founding director of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

On Sunday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose Syriza party was firmly defeated in the EU vote, called snap elections before summer. Austria was already headed for the polls after Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on May 18 dissolved his coalition. On Monday afternoon, Mr. Kurz was toppled by a no-confidence vote in parliament.

Belgium, which held national elections on Sunday, looks set for another protracted period of coalition building, with ethnic nationalist parties surging in Dutch-speaking Flanders, while the left performed strongly in French-speaking Wallonia.

In Germany, the election was a blistering indictment of the two ruling parties. Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union and her left-leaning coalition partner Social Democratic Party both suffered large drops in votes compared with the last European elections in 2014 and the general election of 2017.

The main winner from this erosion wasn’t the stridently nationalist Alternative for Germany—whose share of the vote fell almost 2 percentage points below that of 2017—but the centrist Greens.

The SPD’s dire showing poses the biggest risk to the stability of Ms. Merkel’s government. The party’s relentless shrinkage puts chairwoman Andrea Nahles under growing pressure from grass-roots activists who want her to leave Ms. Merkel’s coalition and reposition the party in opposition.

The absence of a leader-in-waiting with sufficiently broad support, however, could postpone a reckoning for Ms. Nahles—and for the coalition—until after regional elections in Germany’s east in September and October.

In Italy, the elections handed a resounding victory to the nationalist League that reversed a balance of power from last year’s national elections with its coalition partner, the antiestablishment 5 Star Movement.

During campaigning, League leader Matteo Salvini, who is Italy’s interior minister, and members of his party clashed frequently with their 5 Star allies.

Mr. Salvini on Monday discounted, for now, speculation that his strong showing could tempt him to trigger a government crisis leading to fresh national elections.

“We won’t use this [electoral] support to settle accounts internally,” he said. “Our government allies are friends with whom from tomorrow we go back to work serenely.”

Observers say the results will likely help Mr. Salvini dominate the government. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/27/austrian-chancellor-sebastian-kurz-ousted-no-confidence-vote/

Sebastian Kurz was voted out of office as Austrian chancellor on Monday, less than 24 hours after his party won a resounding victory in the European elections.

Mr Kurz’s government lost a confidence vote in the Austrian parliament following the collapse of his coalition with the far-Right Freedom Party (FPÖ).

President Alexander Van der Bellen will now appoint a caretaker government until elections scheduled for September.

Mr Kurz is the first postwar Austrian chancellor to lose a confidence vote, but he is unlikely to be out of power for long.

His Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) will be strong favourites in September, after coming first with a projected 35 per cent in the European elections, more than 10 per cent clear of their closest rivals.

Hailed as the future of European conservatism when he became the world’s youngest leader in 2017 at the age of 31, Mr Kurz was always going to be vulnerable after ending his coalition with the Freedom Party over a corruption scandal just over a week ago.

He attempted to continue at the head of a minority government, but his former coalition partners joined forces with the centre-Left Social Democrats (SPÖ) to vote him out of power.

Mr Kurz accused his opponents of “playing revenge games” ahead of the vote, and warned: “At the end of the day the people will decide”.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/sas-marshall-plan-for-gen

“The gender fluidity cult’s foundation is sheer irrationality after all; gender is to be seen, they contend, as a “social construct” and this notwithstanding that they know what we all know: that every cell in every one of our bodies betokens that we are indisputably forever male or forever female from the moment of our conception (save perhaps for the rare, rare, phenomenon of hermaphroditism).  If such people can think themselves out of the basic structure of biological reality perhaps they were able to think their way out of the common sense of propriety involved in staging such an event in the presence of and focussed upon the minds of infant children.”

Steven Marshall is both Premier and Arts Minister of South Australia, so if anyone bears responsibility for the latest manifestation of the Safe Schools attack upon childhood innocence in this Liberal-governed state it is, I am sorry to say, him. We are in the middle of a bi-annual event here in Adelaide called the DreamBIG Children’s Festival, backed the Liberal government. It is jointly funded by the Arts ministry and the Education ministry and used to be called the “Come-Out” festival but that spoke too indiscreetly, I suppose, about the activist purposes of the bureaucrats who organised it.

This year, and specifically marketed to children under the age of eight, the programme included something called Drag Queen Story Time.

Yes, I am telling you the truth. It was staged in the august State Library in the heart of Adelaide. I went along, with intentions I will describe in a moment, and witnessed two of the performances. They involved two middle-aged men dressed as frumpy fairy tale Queens (one with devil’s horns) reading stories — haltingly and without charm or any kind of narrative tension — to pre-school and very young school-age children in the presence of their parents.

At the end of each session an opportunity was provided for the kiddies to meet and pose for photographs with the drag queens. Again, I am sorry to say I am telling you the truth. The photographs I took — one of which is at left — tell you I am. (Apologies, too, for my substandard lensmanship. Below, if you scroll all the way down, you’ll see another example of drag queen story time time, this one from the US. ‘The hips on the queen go swish, swish, swish‘. Why is it we adopt bad ideas and trends so readily from across the Pacific?)

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14252/erdogan-istanbul-election

Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Board, consisting of judges apparently under government pressure, cancelled the result of the Istanbul mayoral election on the pretext that some officials serving at the polling stations were not civil servants, as required by the law. “The Board’s decision brings Turkish democracy one big step closer to death,” wrote Kemal Kirişçi, senior fellow at TÜSİAD, Turkey’s biggest business association.
“It appears that losing Istanbul entails too many risks for the AKP for the matter to be left to its own resources. Many are convinced that if the AKP were to lose Istanbul to the opposition, after having held it – with its precursor – for 25 years, a hornet’s nest of vested interests, corruption, and abuse of power would be revealed.” — Semih Idiz, a columnist for Sigma Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank.
Even if Erdoğan wins Istanbul in the re-run, he will have lost the last few remaining crumbs of his international credibility.

During most of his nearly 17-year-long term as Turkey’s leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s self-aggrandizing, assertive foreign policy and his Islamist and nationalist one-man-rule have earned him popularity and votes in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years. Erdoğan believed — and made the average Turk believe — that Turkey is a major world power. He claimed that his rule made miracles in the economy. Therefore, since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, he has not lost a single election. Everything was coming up roses all the time. Not anymore.

“Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” has been Erdoğan’s dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey’s 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP). Twenty-five years later, his candidate for mayor of Istanbul, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost in the local election — the first defeat in Istanbul for Islamists since 1994. Game not yet over, Erdoğan ruled.