once for all Europe isn't "socialistic"

One reason is that centre-right leaders, alert to the risk of being portrayed as defenders of a heartless or irresponsible capitalist system, have sought to protect citizens against the worst effects of the recession by preserving jobs where possible and letting the welfare state take care of those in need.

Unemployment benefits, access to medical care and other forms of social expenditure, which come into effect automatically during a recession, form a large part of the €400bn fiscal stimulus that EU policymakers claim to have been implementing over the past six months.

This Franco-German model, criticised in the US and UK in the boom years as an unaffordable, bloated welfare system, has turned out to be exactly what most voters want during the recession.

As a result, even Germany’s Social Democrats, though in coalition with the centre-right Christian Democrats, was unable to make any headway, taking a mere 21 per cent of the vote against 38 per cent for the CDU.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3beed410-5368-11de-be08-00144feabdc0.html

this article in the FT sums it up pretty well. I've seen threads here about "Europe morphing into capitalism". For God's sake, Europeans INVENTED capitalism. But they learned more or less to regulate it. It's the US capitalism which is an aberration which is not sustainable, has "worked" a while but can't any longer. So US neocons who represent a perverted form of capitalism (neo-liberalism), call EU-capitalism "socialism". Which is a lie of course.



PS the label "liberal" (orange) in the pie chart doesn't mean left but free-market oriented. But even those guys are nice compared to reaganists.

the "others" (grey) is made of a multitude of small parties mostly extreme right or extreme left, and a lot of populist parties. Those have no real influence more that they use teh parliament as a tribune.

the dominating blue represent the Franco-German model, that is to say regulated "welfare-capitalism". The classic social democrats (red) have lost seats because they have been unable to reform society in an efficient way, which they did up to the nineties.