fahrenheit451:239

Happiness comes in many forms and it comes quite often best served as a surprise treat.

Sunday March 4 2018 joins all the other Sundaes ( geddit?) that have been served up over the last year or so all across the continent of Europe. Another triumphant manifestation of a sovereign peoples' will as expressed through the legitimate, constitutional mechanism of the ballot box.

The EU's Arch-technocrat rent boy ,Renzi ,who they had originally put in place to facilitate the pimping out of Italian sovereignty is no more. The entire lamentable,German-led Austerity-enforcing ,authoritarian Eurofascist contraption that had been foisted upon them has been summarily smashed to smithereens by the Italian electorate.

Another social democratic party,the party of Renzi, has ended up swinging forlornly on the gibbet of popular sovereignty.

France, Holland ,Germany,Austria,Czech Republic, a litany of liberation,-one after the other Socialist party has been dragged kicking and screaming and begging forgiveness  to its richly deserved and overdue demise.

The Italian verdict was even harsher on the decrepit,treasonable rabble than schadenfreude had any right to expect. The M5S ,Lega successes have come at a moment when the dwindling prospect of the actual fulfilment of brexit is in need of a fillip. This is a signal,however distant and muted that other civilised democratic societies akin to our own are alive and are striving and succeeding.

Alas poor bloody Albion.Stuck, nay shackled with the otiose detritus of two moribund,decaying behemoths that long ago should have been buried in some anonymous grave somewhere.Instead of which  against all civilised human reason Labour and Conservative especially, carry on as if its still the 1980's; thanks largely  to their mutually contrived maintenance and perpetuation ( to the detriment of representative democracy ), of the utterly corrupted and redundant FPTP electoral system from 1867.

The Men of Action,who one had despairingly thought had been lost to History are back at last.This isn't a current nor a trend not even a wave;it's the Whirlwind and it's reaping time.

fahrenheit451:223

From the pages of History comes a warning.

Europe issues Haider ultimatum to Austria

First published on Tuesday 1 February 2000  

European Union members entered uncharted political waters last night by threatening to boycott Austria if Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom party joins a new government.Portugal, the current holder of the EU's rotating presidency, issued an unprecedented statement saying that all member states, with the obvious exception of Austria, would refuse all bilateral contacts with Vienna if that happened.
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The members also served notice they they would not back any Austrian candidate seeking a position with an international body.

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17 years on and the tyrannical authoritarian Superstate continues its swaggering,hubristic,venal practices as if nothing has changed or is ever likely to change in the world at large.

It has bullied and coerced member states, Denmark and Ireland, to re-run democratic national plebiscites that delivered democratic verdicts against the interests of the EU. In other instances,such as France and Holland, the EU has simply chosen to ignore results of inconvenient plebiscites.
Austria in 2000 was subjected to a EU instigated and led unparalleled international campaign of slander and denunciation that violated its national sovereignty.

At the present time it is Hungary and Poland that have been targeted by the EU for special treatment.The EU arrogates to itself a right to interfere in the domestic political discourse and decision making of member states as and when it chooses to do so.Apparently the EU does not like the tenor of the debate over attempts to reform the method of senior judicial appointments and the supreme courts either in Poland or Hungary.

And if the UK wasn't the size it is,it would long since have been bullied into submission over its already floundering effort at #brexit.

The EU is mortally wounded and dying a slow,lingering death.The accompanying Wagnerian cacophony seems designed to add some faux-gravitas to the sorry business of its own squalid demise.
Former EU parliament President Schulz ,now leader of the ailing and electorally crippled German SPD characterised the formation of Austria's new government in conjunction with Hungary's Orban led government as a return of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Which he meant in a disparaging way but one that has no contemporary resonance.

What is true, is that the Visegrad 4 grouping of Hungary,Poland ,Slovakia and Czechia/Czech republic now have a natural ally in Vienna which makes it exceedingly problematic for the predominant neoliberal/globalist cliques to resort to anything as ruthless as they once could with impunity.

The UK  au contraire ought really to be banging on the table and throwing its actual global diplomatic weight around in Brussels.If only we had the perspicacity of the Austrians.

fahrenheit451:206

How much better can this really get?

Three days ago the general election in the Czech republic (Czechia) saw maverick billionaire Babis' ANO party come out on top with 30% of the vote. Generally, anti-EU, anti- mass immigration oriented parties made a strong showing.None of which is in the slightest bit good news for the European Union.

In Italy,the following day, two Northern League run provinces,Lombardy and Venetto held non-binding,advisory referendums on the question of seeking greater economic autonomy from Rome for those regions. The results were on the whole surprising and heartening to the proponents of greater regional autonomy.

The situation in Catalonia continues to deteriorate with the Rajoy administration in Madrid resorting to so-called constitutional powers,contained in their Article 155,to stymie the burgeoning and spontaneous pressure for Catalan independence.

The Bundestag in Germany has assembled for the first time since the AfD's spectacular gains and the SPD's historic reversals, and Merkel's putative coalition talks aren't expected to be resolved for some weeks yet to come.

In Austria the new Chancellor Kurz reckons it'll be December before agoverning coalition between his OVP and the FPO will be up and running.

Throw in the rapidly disintegrating talks on the UK's withdrawal in March 2019 from the EU and what confronts the globalist tyrants in Brussels isn't just some everyday problems but rather the labour of Sisyphus.

And we all know how that particular story in Greek mythology ended.

Schadenfreude , however is a German word.

fahrenheit451:204

Just 72 hours on from Sunday October 15th's Austrian parliamentary elections and confidence and optimism for the future abounds.

It was a case of a lot more than just the " Subterranean Homesick Blues " for Austria's once pre-eminent Socialist party. Blue being the party colours of the Freiheitliche Partei who came within one seat of replacing the obsolescent SPO as Heimat's second party.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. It's blowing from the Right. Or rather more accurately from a rejuvenating populist mood that is being harnessed by forces once described in now moribund Cold War terms as being on the Right.

The complete elimination from  Austria's Nationalrat  of the irksome Greens provided an additional doubleplus feelgood factor to the awaited ascension to the Chancellorship of Sebastian Kurz.

The decrepit and increasingly dysfunctional European Union and its many and varied illegitimate and egregiously authoritarian institutions has been by a volley of damaging bodyshots from Elections all across its once supinely conformist satrapies since 2016.

Once again people are awakening to the prospects of a brighter sovereign future,albeit at a pace that still significantly hobbles their desires and longings for a speedy demise of the EU.

The UK's 23 June referendum put a flame to the trail of gunpowder.

The Netherlands and France saw not only a good increase of electoral support for the policies of Geert Wilders and Marine LePen, but it also signalled the accelerating historic demise of their respective Labour /Socialist parties and the burgeoning electoral irrelevance of other,what were once called  "Left " forces.

The Left have signally failed to engage with and align themselves to the sea change in the popular mood against the neoliberal /globalist EU and for a re-establishment of nation states.
The German Bundestag elections hammered this crucial point firmly home.Out of nowhere the AfD scored a 1/8th share of the national vote and the antedeluvian SPD suffered its biggest slump ever.

And so we come back to Austria,to heimat.

Once the dust has settled , no doubt as with #brexit and the 52% who voted for it,the EU will  get around to instigating and promoting its usual hallmark campaign of insidious slander and defamation against Austria's politicians and against Austria itself just as they're doing already against the UK.

No retreat, no surrender.

fahrenheit451:201

Things really can only get better!

After the recent German federal elections and the even more impressively visceral imbroglio of the regional Catalan referendum, the European Union has now to address another impending controversy.This gleaned from  euObserver online :-

( Their slightly cack-handed translated into euro-english online news snippet conflates just what exactly is being voted for in Austria.These are parliamentary elections and whoever is leader of the winning Party becomes Chancellor. )

Austria

" On Sunday 15 October, the EU could face another political storm when voters in Austria pick their new leader.
Polls indicate that foreign minister Sebastian Kurz  ( leader of the OVP -Peoples Party -) will win the crown, becoming the EU's youngest head of government at just 31 years old, with 34% of votes.
They also indicate that his centre-right People's Party will form a coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (25%).

The last time that happened, in 2000, EU countries imposed a diplomatic boycott of Austria in the Council of the EU.

But this time around, with similar sanctions in the air on Poland's anti-democratic government, the risk of deepening divisions in the Union could be too high to repeat the move. "

All of which is outstanding news and a cause no doubt for Te Deums to ring out across my Heimat.

Ah yes, 2000AD and the EU's most pernicious and unprecedented interference in the internal constitutional affairs of a member state.

One,incidentally they've used as a template in their meddlings in the UK's polity since the referendum Vote of June 2016.

But back to Austria and the broader context of the EU diplomatic boycott of one of its member states.

It was only in the previous year,1999,that the US and its NATO satrapies had completed their annihilation and dismemberment of what had been the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Across the EU we had Blair in the UK ,Chirac in France and Schroeder in Germany.

The participation of a newly vibrant and increasingly popular Freedom Party in the Austrian government as junior coalition partner provided another opportunity for the US to extend the scope of its busybodying after the earlier successful Yugoslav expedition.

The angle of attack,the spinning of this narrative, was predicated on the Freedom Party's leader Jorg Haider on the premise that (1) his Father had been a Nazi and (2) that Jorg Haider maintained an outlook sympathetic to the views his Father had espoused.

And that was it.

17 years on and parts of the then freshly dismembered Yugoslavia - Slovenia and Croatia are now EU satrapies as are most of the states inhabiting what was the territory of only just recently deceased Warsaw Pact/COMECON member states.
And of course the UK is or isn't actually in the throes of forsaking the EU for good;who knows at this stage.

The OVP with Kurz at the helm will in all probability join with the FPO in a governing coalition.The continent wide inexorable historic decline of Socialist parties such as the Austrian SPO will continue unabated.
 Reason enough to cheer!

fahrenheit451:109

Elections, referendums* (* referenda is the correct Latin plural,but we're not in Ancient Rome ) here there and every bleedin' where. The thing with Democracy is that you can never have too much of it. Back in the 1640's the Levellers- the radical wing of the Parliamentary forces- were calling for annual parliaments for heaven's sake.Four Centuries on and we still haven't got there.  The current fashionable theory amongst left-liberal inclined intellectuals-manque is that in the event of any election/referendum result going against their expected and hoped for outcome,then the default explanation of any such unlikely occurrence is that those who contributed to the actual verdict were somehow misled,misinformed,mistaken and misjudged,miscalculated the consequences of them individually and collectively casting their votes in the way that they did; i.e. against the explicit,considered,expert and wise advice of the commentariat/academics,experts and men of vast experience who truly understood the issues being voted upon. My, that was a bit long winded - but I went for it anyway. Today happens to be Saturday, 3rd December and the metropolitan-domiciled elites' ideological war drums are already beating all across MSM. Tomorrow,Sunday 4th December there is to be a plebiscite in Italy regarding proposals from the incumbent Premier,Renzi on the streamlining of Italy's constitution, which he amongst others feels is too cumbersome and no longer fit for contemporary purpose. Across the border over in Austria, due to a preceding procedural cock-up, there is the re-run of what had been an excruciatingly closely run Presidential contest between the Green Party's Van Der Bellen and the Freedom Party's Hofer. the likeliest of outcomes in both referendum and presidential Election will not be to the liking of the elites and their shills in the political classes in western europe. The oppositional 5 Star Movement is mounting a dynamic campaign for a " No " vote against Renzi, and Hofer's Freiheitliche Partei ought to attain a valuable,if largely wholly symbolic victory. I shall certainly be celebrating with unalloyed joy and basking in either or both such tremendous outcomes tomorrow.