In Denmark, for instance, the center-right Venstre Party campaigned on denying welfare benefits to immigrants, hardly a platform to contrast itself with the far-right Danish People's Party.
Politically the continent has rejected the troika's strategy, much as Latin America did in 2000. "We are opposed to everlasting austerity as a means for fiscal rebalancing on both pragmatic and ideological grounds," says Syriza's Tsipras. "The subjugation of democratic process to the markets was the reason why we have the crisis today...we predicted from the onset...that austerity-based policies would backfire."
The trick now will be to pull the various left forces together to hammer out an alternative. Podemos' Iglesias has declared that the Spanish party intended to work "with other parties from Southern Europe to say that we don't want to be a colony of Germany and the troika."
Syriza has already proposed a European summit modeled on the 1953 London Debt Agreement that canceled 50 percent of Germany's World War II debt and spread out payments on the rest over 30 years.
As for the so-called "earthquake" on the right: the neo-Nazis and immigrant bashers will make a lot of noise, but they offer nothing but hate as an economic solution. The left has a better one, and they are back.
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