Sunday, May 25, 2014

IN the NEWS .... EU Elections 2014....



And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay,
they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men:
but they shall not cleave one to another,
even as iron is not mixed with clay.
Daniel 2:43

There are 2 types of groups that believe in the mixing & unity of Europe (despite the teaching of Daniel chapter 2 to the contrary). One group would be the elements of dispensational pre-millennials ("secret rapture" crowd) & some historic pre-millennials (modernist ones).
Some of them seem to believe that the European Union will be a sign of the end & others that Europe will revolve around the return of the Holy Roman Empire with the Pope at it's head. Both are wrong.

Recent headlines for a weakening European Union:
What it's all about.....
"Marine Le Pen, leader of France's far-right National Front, doesn't typically draw votes from people like Marius Pigoni.
For decades, the 80-year-old sawmill owner voted for moderate politicians who espoused the European ideal of building an economic bloc free from the nationalist forces that drove the continent into two world wars.
But as people in the European Union's 28 member countries vote on a new European Parliament, Mr. Pigoni's focus is a worry that his sawmill business will be ruined by low-cost imports, including from Eastern Europe.
Ms. Le Pen is leading a campaign to abolish the EU. She is getting Mr. Pigoni's vote.
"As someone who saw the war, I can tell you the EU was a great idea," he said. "But now it's become a farce. We're broke and we're offering billions to Ukraine."
Like Mr. Pigoni, many Europeans have fallen out of love with mainstream political parties and their technocratic creation, the EU.
The EU, they say, has become a bureaucratic machine that excels at dispensing edicts on how cheese is labeled while ignoring everyday problems such as unemployment and illegal immigration. By some polling estimates, myriad anti-EU groups could nearly double their tally in May 22-25 voting from the last European Parliament election five years ago by taking as much as a quarter of the seats.
Casting the EU as public enemy No. 1, Ms. Le Pen .....Having expanded her National Front's following in France, she is setting out to unite Europe's disparate nationalist parties into an anti-EU caucus at the European Parliament—one that could stall the decades long march toward a United States of Europe." WSJ
From Britain....
"Nigel Farage claims to have secured the "most extraordinary result in British politics for 100 years" as UKIP topped the European polls.
With only Scotland left to declare, UKIP has 27.5% of the vote and 23 MEPs.
Labour, on 25%, is narrowly beating the Tories to second place thanks to a strong showing in London but both parties have 18 MEPs so far.
The Lib Dems, on 7%, are coming fifth behind the Green Party, on 8%, and have lost all but one of their seats.
The full Scottish result will be known at noon on Monday, as the Western Isles does not count votes on a Sunday.
The BBC is predicting that the result in Scotland will be SNP on two seats, Labour on two seats and the Conservatives and UKIP with one seat each - meaning Mr Farage's anti-EU party is expected to win at least one seat in every region of Great Britain." BBC
From Germany....
"Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bloc won the most votes in Germany’s election for the European Parliament, even as a campaign to ditch the euro gained support, ARD television projections showed.
Merkel’s Christian Democratic bloc won 35.5 percent, the least since voters began choosing European Union lawmakers in 1979, according to ARD projections based on initial returns late yesterday. The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which wants to dismantle the currency union, took an estimated 7 percent for its first seats in any election.
The Social Democrats, Merkel’s coalition partner, won 27.2 percent after an all-time low of 20.8 percent in 2009. The party campaigned for the EU socialist candidate, European Parliament President Martin Schulz, who is vying to head the European Commission.
While the right is causing tremors in France and the U.K., Germany’s results mirror the island of political and economic self-satisfaction that it is,” Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Group NV in Brussels, said by phone. It’s an endorsement of the status quo.”" Bloomberg
From France....

"Far-right National Front stuns French elite with EU 'earthquake.... Marine Le Pen's far-right National Front stunned France's political elite on Sunday by taking first place in European Parliament elections, with
President Francois Hollande's Socialists beaten into a poor third, provisional results showed.
It was the first time the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party had won a nationwide election in its four-decade history. If the results are confirmed, it could secure as many as 25 seats in the new European Parliament, more than eight times the three it won in 2009.

"The people have spoken loud and clear," a triumphant Le Pen told cheering supporters at party headquarters in a northwestern suburb of Paris." ChicagoTribune

From the Netherlands....
"There was a suprising outcome after a day of voting for the
Geert Wilders
European Parliament in The Netherlands
:
while the Dutch eurosceptic Geert Wilders dominated media and the public debate throughout the campaign, it now looks like his PVV party has lost two seats in the next EU Parliament.

While the far-right party made losses, the left-liberal D66 and the centre-right CDA claimed victory. These two parties are neck-and-neck for the first spot, coming out at 15.6% and 15.2% of votes respectively." EA

From Italy....
"Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was on course for a triumph in Sunday's European election with early projections giving his center-left Democratic Party (PD) a strong lead over the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement of ex-comic Beppe Grillo.
Grillo

A projection by IPR Marketing for RAI state television put the PD on 41.4 percent ahead of the 5-Star Movement on 22.4 percent with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party on 15.7 percent.
For Grillo, who won a stunning 25.5 percent of the vote in last year's parliamentary election and who said he expected to win the election, the result would be below expectations. But it would nonetheless consolidate his rowdy and unconventional movement as the second force in Italian politics." Reuters