Prime Ministers Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and David Cameron of the United Kingdom attend a summit of European leaders in Brussels, October 26, 2011 (AFP/Eric Feferberg)

In 2010, a new right rose in Europe. Parties that were or had become economically conservative and socially liberal came to power despite the left blaming their free market ideology for the financial crisis. Now, the tides are turning.

Denmark’s christian democrats and liberals were ousted in September of last year after a decade in government and replaced by a left wing administration.

Theirs had been a minority government, supported in parliament by the far right and nationalist Danish People’s Party which parted with other two right wing parties on entitlement and labor market reforms. By positioning itself as the champion of pensioners and the working class, the People’s Party appealed to a constituency which increasingly mistrusted the typically pro-European and pro-globalization conservatives and liberals.

In the Netherlands, a similar administration took office in September 2010. The liberal party had won the elections on a platform of economic repair and formed a minority cabinet with the christian democrats who had lost half of their seats, many of them to Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, ideologically equivalent to the Danish People’s Party.

Wilders supported the conservative-liberal coalition in parliament until this weekend when he rejected additional austerity measures.

The government had initially planned only the barest possible of spending cuts but was forced to consider steeper reductions to bring the deficit under 3 percent of gross domestic product in 2013 per European treaty rules. Now, it may have lost the legitimacy and the majority to do so.

Prime Minister Petr Nečas’s center right government of the Czech Republic is also aiming to balance the budget by reining in health care and pension spending and raising taxes but it too could lose the support of one of its coalition partners, raising the possibility of parliamentary elections as early as June.

Like their Dutch counterparts, the Czech right wing parties never made the philosophical argument for smaller government. The left wing opposition, rallying with trade unions in the streets against “devastating” cuts and “asocial reforms,” is winning the public debate.

The godfather of Europe’s new right wing movement, David Cameron, remains fairly popular in the polls despite enacting policies that are similar to his beleaguered counterparts on the continent. His “detoxification” of the Conservative Party brand of one that cares only for the rich hasn’t stopped the Labour opposition from credibly arguing that his government doesn’t care for the little guy though. It is only because of Labour’s ineffectual leader Ed Miliband that the party hasn’t managed to mount a more convincing stand against British austerity.

Cameron’s position is far from enviable however. His lackluster austerity agenda has failed to wield significant results. The British economy remains in recession but the political and public resistance to further budget restraint is so high that it’s probably too late now for the coalition to change its tone and argue that it’s shrinking government for anything but pragmatic reasons.

Margaret Thatcher didn’t win three elections telling voters that she didn’t have a choice but to enact unpopular austerity measures. She convinced them that it was the right thing to do.

When times are tough, people will be inclined to vote for the party that seems to them capable of managing the nation’s finances. As soon as a crisis is averted, which many left wing parties seem to believe is the case, the political managers lose their appeal however. People don’t just care for policy. They crave for a politics of vision.

Austerity is not an ideology. It is a means to an end but when the end is left unsaid, who but a masochist would vote for it? The left, at least, has its appeal to “fairness.” Europe’s right hasn’t dared articulate an alternative vision for fear of appearing asocial and losing elections—and now it’s losing anyway.

Former Pennsylvania senator and Republican Party presidential hopeful appears on MSNBC's Morning Joe, January 10, 2012 (Louis Burgdorf)

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has replaced Newt Gingrich as the conservative standard bearer in the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

After huge election wins in the Midwestern states of Minnesota and Missouri this month and staging a surprise victory in Colorado, Santorum has jumped ahead of the presumptive nominee Mitt Romney in recent nationwide surveys while the former House speaker, who, just a month ago, appeared poised to challenge Romney as the more right wing candidate in the race, has been decimated in the polls.

Romney’s nationwide support has remained fairly steady at over 25 percent for months. Currently, just less than a third of the Republican electorate considers him the best candidate.

Gingrich, whose popularity peaked at over 30 percent after he won the primary election in South Carolina in early January, has seen his support plummet to between 10 and 15 percent. Santorum, by contrast, has doubled his support—clearly at the former speaker’s expense.

Texas congressman Ron Paul, a libertarian candidate, has polled around 12 percent since December. Few believe that he stands a chance of winning the race. His aim seems to be to accumulate delegates in order to influence the party platform at the nominating convention in August.

Just as Newt Gingrich’s sudden popularity in early January had less to do with the former House speaker than Republican primary voters’ lack of enthusiasm for Mitt Romney, Santorum’s surge could prove temporary once conservatives take a closer look at his record.

Romney is perceived as a moderate because he once favored abortion rights and implemented a health insurance scheme in Massachusetts when he was governor that resembles President Barack Obama’s health reform legislation. Gingrich, however, also once favored a mandate that forces people to buy health insurance; a measure which conservatives now oppose.

Both Gingrich and Romney expressed support for the unpopular 2008 bank bailout program but Santorum didn’t distance himself from the effort until he began to campaign for the presidential nomination either. He also favored pork barrel spending, or earmarks, as senator and voted to expand Medicare, the federal health support program for the elderly.

Santorum did champion welfare and Social Security reform and is a staunch social conservative—he strongly opposes abortion and legal recognition of gay partnerships—but is far from the ideal, small government conservative that the Republican base hungers for.

Indeed, he admitted as much in 2006 when he argued that most conservatives do not embrace the notion of personal autonomy. “Some do,” he said. “They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want.” According to Santorum, it is “not how traditional conservatives view the world” although this more libertarian view on what should be the role of government is gaining strength within the Tea Party and among Ron Paul supporters.

The Texas congressman likes to point out that he is the only one among the four Republican Party presidential contenders who draws young people to his cause. In both the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries last month, Paul won half of the youth vote.

It may be why Jim DeMint, a very socially conservative senator from South Carolina, cautioned his fellow Republicans against ignoring the Paul vote in the nominating contests. “If Republicans don’t figure out how to listen to and understand some of the things he’s saying,” he told Fox News in January, it could split the party.

Especially on issues of contraception and gay marriage, Santorum’s beliefs, inspired by his Catholic faith, do not align with the views of the majority of Americans, including young Americans who are drawn to the Ron Paul’s message of individual liberty and limited government.

The Santorum campaign knows this and tries to emphasize their candidate’s blue collar roots and industrial policy.

The Pennsylvania native, a traditional swing state with twenty electoral votes up for grabs, promises to reinvigorate American manufacturing with a tax regime that disproportionately favors factory labor. He rejects global warming as a leftist conspiracy and would allow energy companies to “drill everywhere” for oil and gas. This could prove popular in Rust Belt states like Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania where there are many unionized working class voters, sometimes known as a “Reagan Democrats,” who may be tempted to vote Republican, as they voted for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, if they perceive the Democratic candidate as an elitist and out of touch with their everyday struggles while the Republican speaks their language.

February 28 will be a test for Santorum’s strategy when primary voters in Michigan head for the polls. Mitt Romney was born there and his father was governor of the state in the 1960s when he also ran for president—unsuccessfully.

During the 2008 presidential primary, Romney won Michigan with 39 percent of the vote compared to Senator John McCain’s 30 percent. That was before Romney said to oppose public financial support for two of Detroit’s automakers however. Recent polls have him and Santorum tied in Michigan.

If Romney loses his home state, he would be hard pressed to maintain his frontrunner status while Santorum can claim that his message resonates beyond the evangelical base of the Republican Party and could endear Reagan Democrats to his election bid.

Texas congressman Ron Paul, a Republican Party presidential hopeful, appears on ABC News' This Week, February 5

Texas congressman Ron Paul, a long shot candidate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, told ABC News’ This Week on Sunday that his campaign was changing the political landscape.

Citing high turnout at campaign events, especially from young people, Paul said an “intellectual revolution is going on and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That’s where I’m very optimistic.”

The septuagenarian congressman, who has announced that he will not stand for reelection in Texas, captured more than 20 percent of the vote in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire last month. In both elections, Paul won half the youth vote and in the latter, a third of self declared independents.

Among first time voters, too, Paul’s limited government and antiwar rhetoric resonated although it remains anathema to many social conservatives and defense hawks who reject the Texan’s candidacy as having no bearing on their party’s future.

Paul on Sunday begged to differ. “There’s a lot of people talking about free market economics rather than Keynesian welfarism and interventionism,” he said.

There is an intellectual revolution going on with the young people. There are people who have sat on the sidelines for years.

He observed that many Republican primary voters remain unsatisfied with the current field of presidential hopefuls. “I don’t see a lot of difference among our other candidates or between the two parties,” he said. “It’s all big government spending. Nobody wants to cut anything. Nobody wants to stop the wars.”

Where other candidates have proposed cuts in projected spending increases, Paul would eliminate $1 trillion in spending from the actual budget. Even such a huge reduction in spending wouldn’t balance the budget however. The federal deficit this fiscal year is expected to reach $1.1 trillion which is down from nearly $1.6 trillion last year.

Paul didn’t do as well as expected in Nevada’s caucuses over the weekend but hopes to rebound in Colorado and Maine this week. Republican voters there tend to be more libertarian.

Even if he doesn’t win in any of the states outright, the congressman will pick up delegates that he can take to the nominating convention in August to try to influence the party platform if not the nominee. If neither of his fellow contenders manages to gather a majority of delegates before the convention, Paul’s could cast the deciding vote.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican Party presidential hopeful, appears on NBC's Meet the Press, January 22

Newt Gingrich’s huge win in the Republican primary election in South Carolina on Saturday may have had less to do with the former House speaker’s popularity and everything to do with conservatives’ resentment of their presumptive nominee, Mitt Romney.

On CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday, Gingrich suggested that Romney lost votes in South Carolina when “people began to realize that he’d been pro-choice, pro-gun control and pro-tax increase” as a governor in the northeastern state of Massachusetts between 2003 and 2007.

Romney has defended his record by pointing out that he had to work with a Democratic legislature in Massachusetts and claimed that he changed his position on abortion when he was confronted with the issue of stem cell research. As a result, he was nevertheless “way to the left of South Carolinians,” as Gingrich put it.

It’s not just that Romney is perceived as a moderate; he has failed to enthuse Republican activists for an election that many of them regard as historic. As former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour put it on Face the Nation, “Romney’s strengths are more managerial.” Gingrich, by contrast, is able to rally people with his ability to clearly and concisely articulate conservative beliefs and positions.

Gingrich described himself as a “populist conservative” on NBC’ Meet the Press and said that what “nobody in Washington or New York gets is the level of anger at the national establishment. People who are just sick and tired of being told what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say.”

This reiterated the argument that Gingrich made in his victory speech in South Carolina on Saturday night where he suggested that “the elites in Washington and New York have no understanding, no care, no concern” for ordinary Americans.

The American people feel that they have elites that been trying for a half century to force us to quit being American.

This sort of rhetoric tends to resonate with right wing voters who resent what they perceive as government overreach and an Obama Administration that Gingrich said last night has been a “disaster.”

It’s why conservative RedState blogger Erick Erickson observed that people were flocking to Gingrich not so much because they liked him but because they were “looking for a vessel to channel their anger with Obama and their complete disappointment with the GOP establishment which is now embodied perfectly by Romney.”

Former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, now an MSNBC morning show host, insisted that Gingrich wasn’t even a conservative. “He uses this resentment to actually hide a record,” he said on Meet the Press; a record that is far from reactionary and fairly similar to Mitt Romney’s. Both previously supported an individual health insurance mandate and both previously supported emission trade legislation. Neither is particularly popular with the conservative base anymore.

The Republican establishment in Washington gave us $5 trillion of debt during the Bush era. They took a $155 billion surplus and turned it into a $1 trillion deficit. They engaged in radical foreign policy, Wilsonian foreign policy. George Bush promising to end tyranny across the globe. The conservative moment is saying “no,” stop.

“Gingrich is not going to be our final choice,” Scarborough predicted. “But we’re not handing this off to Mitt Romney right now.”

Republican senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina appears on Fox News' Hannity, January 13

South Carolina senator Jim DeMint on Friday cautioned his fellow Republicans against ignoring the Ron Paul vote in their party’s presidential primary elections. “If Republicans don’t figure out how to listen to and understand some of the things he’s saying,” he told Fox News’ Hannity, it could break up the party.

Conservatives worry about a third party run by Paul because it could split the right wing vote and enable President Barack Obama to win reelection in November.

Unlike previous primary contests, when Paul rarely won more than 10 percent of the vote, in Iowa and New Hampshire this month, he won more than 20 percent each time. Voters registered as independents were able to participate in both elections and Paul did especially well among them and voters under the age of twenty-nine. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, Paul won half the youth vote and in the latter, a third of self declared independents.

Among first time voters, too, Paul’s limited government and antiwar rhetoric resonated but it’s anathema to many social conservatives and defense hawks who reject the Texas congressman’s candidacy as having no bearing on the party’s future. DeMint didn’t share that view on Friday. “The whole debate within the Republican Party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians,” he said.

Paul’s used to be mainstream conservatism in the United States. The Republican Party abandoned its noninterventionism in the wake of World War II while its emphasis on individual liberty eroded as a consequence of the religious revival of the 1980s which prompted even once presidential candidate and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, whose views on the proper role of government were similar to Paul’s, to lament his party’s reactionary positions on cultural issues as abortion and gay rights.

Representative of the religious right in today’s primary race is former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum who rivaled frontrunner Mitt Romney for a first place finish in Iowa and who hopes to do well in South Carolina’s primary next week.

Santorum told National Public Radio in 2006 quite frankly that most conservatives do not embrace the notion of personal autonomy anymore. “Some do,” he admitted. “They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want.”

Although Paul is opposed to abortion rights, his views on drug legislation, education policy and marriage are far outside the mainstream of Republican thought. According to Santorum, it is “not how traditional conservatives view the world.”

I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

Goldwater would beg to differ. So does between 5 and 7 percent of voters nationwide if Paul were to run as an independent in November’s presidential election.

At least 80 percent of his support as a third party candidate would come at the expense of the Republican ticket. States like Florida, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia, which were carried by George W. Bush in 2004 but won by Obama in 2008, could all go for the Democrat if Paul acts as a “spoiler” on the right. Together they wield sixty-eight electoral votes which could tilt the balance in the president’s favor. So if only for electoral reasons, Republicans ought to take notice of Paul’s mounting popularity.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Republican Party presidential hopeful, speaks to voters in Washington DC, October 8 (Gage Skidmore)

Mitt Romney seems poised to secure the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. The former Massachusetts governor has seen most of his rivals’ campaigns implode around him but few American conservatives are warming up to the prospect of a Romney candidacy.

The latest conservative darling, Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House of Representatives during the 1990s, isn’t likely to be nominated. Married thrice and prone to making bombastic pronouncements about his leadership capacities, social conservatives mistrust him and centrist voters would probably not prefer him over Barack Obama in a general election. They remember his tumultuous speakership when the Republicans’ intransigence forced a Federal Government shutdown in 1995 and 1996.

Gingrich’s newfound popularity follows former businessman Herman Cain’s demise in the polls as he struggles with allegations of sexual harassment. His surge was anticipated by the spectacular rise and fall of Texas governor Rick Perry who had been hailed as the right’s redeemer only to disappoint in the candidates’ debates. Last month, he failed to remember one of the three departments of government he would like to dismantle on live television—a painful moment for Perry who has to transcend his cowboy image if he is to be nominated.

Perry’s “brain freeze” notwithstanding, he’s not out of the running altogether. The conservative base of the Republican Party is desperately looking for an alternative to Romney while the first primary contest is less than a month away.

The heir presumptive to the nomination, who was considered a frontrunner for the 2008 election but lost the primary race against John McCain, hasn’t managed to enthuse party activists with his managerial style and finely tuned debate performances. What’s more, they aren’t too sure about Romney’s convictions.

Romney, who governed in the liberal state of Massachusetts before he ran for his party’s presidential nomination, declared himself in favor of abortion rights before he became pro-life. He was in favor of gun control before he wasn’t. And in Massachusetts, he enacted a health care reform scheme that included a mandate that people buy insurance—the very tenet of President Obama’s health reform legislation which conservatives so staunchly opposed.

Creating jobs and reviving the American economy may be the most important themes of the November election but committed conservatives aren’t quick to forgive Romney for the moderate positions he has held in the past.

Recently, he’s tried a more populist approach—advocating military action against Iran and enacting punitive tariffs against China—but Romney isn’t advancing in the polls. During the 2008 primary contest, he never managed to win more than roughly 25 percent of the Republican vote nationwide. He’s struggled to maintain his lead at over 20 percent during the current election cycle.

Even in one on one polls, when he is pitted against fringe candidates like Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, who stand no chance of winning a general election, half of the Republican electorate won’t vote for Mitt Romney. These are several tens of millions of conservative Americans who prefer any candidate over their frontrunner. They are a force to be reckoned with.

Romney is unlikely to do well in Iowa where right wing voters tend to be more conservative than in most of the rest of the United States. The January caucuses will probably be won by one of the social conservatives in the race. Romney isn’t even campaigning there. He could do well in the first primary election in New Hampshire where Republicans are more centrist and independents are allowed to vote as well but he will probably lose in South Carolina which is, again, a very conservative state.

If, by the time of the South Carolina primary late in January, the conservative base of the Republican Party has coalesced around a single candidate like Rick Perry, who has the most extended campaign besides Romney’s and an impressive war chest to finance radio and television commercials, Romney could be hard pressed to retain his lead in Florida and Nevada, the fourth and fifth primary states respectively, where he now maintains narrow leads in the polls.

Even in Florida, which is home to millions of retirees who are skeptical of Herman Cain’s and Rick Perry’s plans for pension privatization, Romney hasn’t been able to boost his popularity north of 25 percent.

Although conservatives aren’t warming up to Romney, they are adjusting to the probability of his candidacy. More than half of likely Republican voters expect that he will be the nominee even if they don’t want him to be.

Party heavyweights like New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who had been encouraged by conservative opinion leaders to run for the nomination but declined, as well as his former rival Tim Pawlenty, who dropped out of the race when his poll numbers wouldn’t approve, have thrown their support behind Romney, adding to the aura of inevitability that his campaign has tried to foster.

It would be ironic and quite possibly a disappointment for the Republican Party to settle on a traditional, pro-business candidate like Romney after the Tea Party rebellion of 2010 helped Republicans regain their majority in the House of Representatives.

The conservative “revolution” that swept not just Washington but dozens of states where Republican legislatures and governorships turned red again after the Democratic victory wave of 2008 could extinguish with a Romney candidacy. He may appeal to the center but he isn’t liked on the right. If this translates into a lack of grassroots activism and volunteer campaigning for him in November of next year, when America’s economic prospects may have slowly started to improve, it could even cost Romney the general election.

Patrick Buchanan on Fox News' Hannity, October 18

Will tribalism trump globalism? That’s the bigger ideological struggle that can be derived from Patrick Buchanan’s latest book, Suicide of a Superpower, which argues not just that the United States are disintegration but that the whole of Western civilization could dissolve.

The former Republican Party presidential hopeful and political commentator fears a Balkanization of America as the country becomes increasingly secular and people of European descent are dying it. “The death of European Christianity means the disappearance of the European tribe,” he writes, “a prospect visible in the demographic statistics of every Western nation.”

Peoples of European descent are not only in a relative but a real decline. They are aging, dying, disappearing. This is the existential crisis of the West.

Buchanan points out that by 2020, whites over the age of sixty-five are expected to outnumber those aged seventeen and younger. “Deaths will exceed births,” he notes and “Mexico is moving north.”

The demographic shift will exacerbate tension between conservatives and liberals in the country. Whereas immigration increasingly fuels apprehension on the right, the political left has embraced multiculturalism. Buchanan wonders, “What kind of man looks with transcendental joy to a day when the people among whom he was raised have become a minority in a nation where the majority rules?”

Historians will look back in stupor, Buchanan predicts, at twenty-first century Americans “who believed the magnificent republic they inherited would be enriched by bringing in scores of millions from the failed states of the Third World.”

On Fox News’ Hannity Monday night, Buchanan suggested that the left has a political motive for supporting immigration. Minorities, he pointed out, overwhelmingly vote Democratic. Once they constitute half of the electorate, “Republicans will never win another election.”

Ethnic minorities trend Democratic because “they depend on government,” he said. “They believe in government. And they vote for the party of government.” Even if their values are Christian or conservative.

To prevent the stagnation of European culture in America and combat the decline of conservatism, Buchanan advocated a moratorium on immigration. He claimed that after the United States imposed immigration quota in the 1920s, citizens of eastern and southern European descent had time to grow out of poverty. “Once they move into the middle class, into the taxpayer category,” they’ll consider voting for the party of small government, he said.

If, on the other hand, the United States make no effort to stem the tide of immigration and allow a disintegration of American culture, it will give rise to an ethnic nationalism, according to Buchanan who writes in his book that it will inevitably trump globalism.

We may deny the existence of ethnonationalism, detest it, condemn it. But this creator and destroyer of empires and nations is a force infinitely more powerful than globalism, for it engages the heart. Men will die for it. Religion, race, culture and tribe are the four horsemen of the coming apocalypse.

Buchanan’s moratorium on immigration represents half of his isolationism. Protectionism is the other half. These may seem appropriate steps to take for a country if indeed modern tribalism is more powerful a motivator for people than the economic benefit that is derived from globalization. But is this true when a person’s self interest collides with his “tribal” affiliation, whether it’s race or religion or politics?

Globalization is an unstoppable force because free trade is demonstrably more advantageous to a country than is protectionism; because open markets are demonstrably more prosperous than closed ones. Countries that turn inward tend to lose business whereas countries that engage in competition instead of trying to cheat others blossom.

The globalized world of the early twenty-first century is testament to the success of American superpower. Without its military superiority, which ensured a predictable balance of power, and proven economic model of success, other nations either could nor or would not have become part of it.

There is, however, in every country, even America, a class that’s unable to keep up with the highly competitive and demanding flexibility of being part of a global labor market. There is an even larger group of people in every country that doesn’t recognize the tremendous benefits of globalization even if they’re able to buy cheap products made in China.

These people depend on a model of government, the welfare state, that’s bankrupt. It’s a model that Buchanan, a small government conservative, has never endorsed. If he wants to kill it, he shouldn’t champion isolationism, which would allow people to continue to believe for probably a longer period of time that it’s a sustainable model; he should embrace globalism as the destroyer of the big government that he has always rallied against.

Schweriner Schloss, the seat of the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, October 6, 2006

Germany’s ruling conservative and liberal parties suffered major defeats in regional elections this weekend. The loss is the latest in a series of setbacks for the country’s right wing governing parties.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s christian democrats, the largest federal party, secured just 23 percent of the vote in northeast Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, down from 28.8 percent in 2006. The social democratic SPD surged from 30.2 to 35.7 percent while the opposition Greens also made gains.

The Free Democrat Party, Merkel’s coalition partner in Berlin, didn’t make the election threshold. Die Linke won 18.4 percent of the vote. The far left is traditionally popular in former East Germany.

Many conservative Germans feel that they have shouldered their fair share of the burden of bailing out the rest of Europe. The chancellor’s involvement in the financial rescue operations of Greece, Ireland and Portugal seems at odds with the values of austerity and prudence she champions at home. Yet the largest opposition parties favor closer European integration than she does.

The right wing FDP is the only occasionally euroskeptic among major German political parties but its base has all but evaporated.

The social democrats and Green party previously won a narrow majority in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, otherwise a conservative stronghold. Last February, the christian democrats were decimated in local elections in Hamburg where the SPD secured an outright majority—a novelty in coalition heavy German politics.

The liberals and conservatives also suffered losses in the western industrial state of North Rhine-Westphalia last year which robbed their coalition of its upper house majority. According to recent polls, the liberals would receive less than 5 percent of the vote nationwide—a dismal performance after their historic win in 2009 when they claimed 15 percent of the national vote.

The fate of Germany’s liberals reflects a changing European political constellation in which voters are increasingly wary of compromise and drawn to the extremes of the spectrum.

Among the liberal party’s voters, leftists have been disillusioned by their support for spending cuts and found an alternative in the progressive Green party while moderates are attracted to the right where they find conservatives who a “tougher on crime” and share their concerns about immigration from Muslim countries and Eastern Europe. There doesn’t seem to be much room for social liberalism in the middle anymore.

Although social democrats are Greens are coalition partners across German local governments, the SPD may not return to government after federal elections in 2013. All European labor parties are struggling to regain relevance. The unpopularity of Merkel’s conservatives should not be mistaken for a vindication of the opposition party’s economic policy. The SPD hasn’t yet managed to reinvent itself as a broad and centrist platform for reform. Young urban professionals prefer the more cosmopolitan Green party while the christian democrats continue to enjoy broad support among a largely rural and aging constituency.

Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda of Japan in Kyoto, November 5, 2010 (AP)

As Japan changed prime minister this week for the sixth time in as many years, it’s tempting to dismiss the leadership reshuffle as virtually insignificant. Yoshihiko Noda, however, may finally herald the change that his Democratic Party promised to bring to Tokyo when it swept to power two years ago.

In what is interpreted as a sign of the new prime minister’s conservatism, Noda picked a relative lightweight to head his finance department—a key position in his cabinet as Japan copes with a debt twice the size of its $5 trillion economy and an expensive recovery in its northeast which was devastated by an earthquake and tsunami in March.

Without a potential challenger in the finance ministry, Noda can be expected to call the shots himself on economy policy where he believes a balance between fiscal consolidation and pro-growth reform is essential. “We can lose no time in reforming public finances,” he told a news conference after being formally appointed on Friday. “But I’m not putting fiscal reform on top of everything else.”

Noda could push for an increase in the nation’s sale tax which has among the lowest rates in the industrialized world. His predecessor failed to act on a promise to consider it. Naoto Kan, who was also finance minister before he headed the government, did enact tax relief for Japanese business last year in an attempt to boost economic growth.

At 40 percent, Japan’s corporate tax rate was the highest among major economies.

Noda replaced Kan who was generally unpopular and had been discredited by the nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima this spring. He inherits not only a divided parliament but warring factions in his Democratic Party as well.

Noda’s election was a setback for the powerful party chief Ichirō Ozawa who challenged Kan in August of last year after maneuvering him into the finance ministry in the first place. The first Democratic finance minister insisted on fiscal restraint to reduce Japan’s colossal debt. Kan was supposed to be more “flexible” in facilitating the sort of pork barrel spending and nepotism which propelled Ozawa to power.

The man who is often called Japan’s “shadow shogun” because of his enormous sway in Democratic Party politics was instrumental in its 2009 election victory which ended decades of Liberal Democratic Party rule. His tactics have since come under scrutiny however and his prestige has dwindled as evidenced by Noda’s win. Ozawa backed his opponent.

The party elder’s first chosen prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, left office after less than nine months in power amid disappointment over his indecisiveness and incompetence.

Signaling a departure from Liberal Democratic policy, Hatoyama had demanded that the United States move a military base off the island of Okinawa as a demonstration of Japan’s security independence. The Americans, however, stayed put. Hatoyama, who, for all his rhetoric, recognized that Japan was extremely dependent on American protection, resigned in disgrace.

The Okinawa base debacle distracted attention from the real failure of Hatoyama’s cabinet—its unimaginative fiscal policy which offered no change at all from Liberal Democratic orthodoxy.

Before they came to power in 2009, the Democrats vowed to represent “self reliant individuals” and reduce the burdensome scope of Japan’s welfare state in favor of a market driven approach.

Once in government and confronted with a global economic contraction, the party blamed the free market policies of the past for job losses and a widening income gap. It suddenly championed more of the very Keynesian, demand side stimulus which had been implemented by the Liberal Democrats for close to two decades. A record, $1 trillion dollar budget was enacted, full of measures that were designed to soften the impact which the recession had on working Japanese.

The spending spree hugely increased Japan’s indebtedness while recovering from March’s natural disaster will probably require more borrowing on the short term.

It’s too soon to tell whether Noda has the political capital and the will to truly rein in the Japanese state but he says he wants to.

While finance minister, Noda championed a 10 percent spending cut across all departments of Japan’s government and aimed to cap the issuance of new sovereign bonds at half a trillion dollars. The need for fiscal restraint is clearly present as tax income now covers less than half of Japan’s annual budget.

In terms of foreign policy, the new prime minister signals a return to normalcy. He promised to restore the alliance with the United States as the “very foundation” of Japan’s international relations while Chinese editorials have chastised him for identifying rising nationalism and naval power across the East China Sea as potentially hazardous to regional stability.

Prime Minister Silvo Berlusconi of Italy and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany during a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, April 4, 2009

Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are pushing for legal changes that would force their governments to pass balanced budgets instead of running the sort of high deficits that have become the norm since 2008′s financial crisis and subsequent economic contraction. In Europe, enshrining deficit limits in national constitutions might even become a condition for remaining part of the continent’s single currency area.

Western governments have borrowed heavily to finance deficit spending in recent years. Although austerity appears to be in vogue in Europe, even countries that are implementing deep budget cuts are unlikely to achieve balance for at least two more years.

Fiscal consolidation is a short term goal in many European countries nonetheless, especially after financial markets started to worry about the creditworthiness of Italy and Spain last week and drove up their borrowing costs. The European Central Bank intervened with a bond purchasing operation to provide temporary relief but its president Jean-Claude Trichet has warned that “monetary policy responsibility cannot,” in the long term, “substitute for government irresponsibility.” Countries have to slash spending, fast.

France and Italy both announced additional austerity measures last week, including tens of billions of euros in cutbacks. Italy, which is the third largest economy in the eurozone, could be especially vulnerable as its public debt equals some 120 percent of gross domestic product.

In the United States, by contrast, where the national debt almost equals the size of the economy, the administration is reluctant to scale back public investments. Indeed, President Barack Obama and his Democratic Party insist that more stimulus is needed to propel the economy into recovery.

The American Government currently borrows approximately a third of what it spends, amounting to a deficit of nearly 10 percent of GDP. Shortfalls are projected for several more years, necessitating several trillions in spending reductions over the next decade if the country is to achieve balance in the medium term.

Opposition Republicans, who control the lower chamber of Congress, have passed a comprehensive “cut, cap and balance” plan for fiscal consolidation that cuts federal spending immediately, caps it at a certain measure of GDP and legally prohibits future deficit spending with a balanced budget amendment. The Democratic majority in the Senate rejected the proposal as did the president.

“We don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs,” Obama explained last month, which is “to make sure that the government is living within its means.” He has yet to present a credible plan for deficit reduction however. His 2012 budget proposal included just $100 billion in yearly cuts, trillions short of the amount that independent experts and the Congressional Budget Office estimate is necessary to eventually regain balance.

A balanced budget amendments is popular with American voters. Nearly all the states already have such provisions in place.

European politicians are exploring similar methods to force especially countries in the periphery like Greece to rein in spending. French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that they would push other eurozone governments to enshrine deficit limits in their constitutions. Sarkozy advocates such a measure at home although his socialist opposition is skeptical. One leftist presidential contender has suggested that the conservative first aim to achieve his 3 percent deficit target for 2013 before considering constitutional reform.

Germany enacted a balanced budget provision in the wake of the financial crisis in 2009 which limited its government’s yearly ability to borrow to .35 percent of GDP, starting in 2016. From 2020 onward, the German states will not be permitted to run a deficit at all except during emergencies.

The countries most desperately in need of fiscal reform are Greece and Spain where socialists governments have been unable to reduce spending enough to meet the European deficit maximum of 3 percent of GDP. Both had a 10 percent shortfall last year and each had their credit ratings downgraded, stirring market apprehension about the indebtedness of countries like Belgium and Italy which were previously deemed safe. Imposing deficit limits on governments throughout the eurozone should assure investors that countries will not be permitted to continue to pile on debt.