2006 Dutch election

[Bono]

PvdA o/c

Labour - typical European center-left party, much like the German SPD or pre-Blair Labour

Pre-Blair Labour?

I'm not really sure what you mean by that; the only long-term change Blair made to Labour in terms of ideology or policies was the re-writing of Clause IV (which was purely symbolic as the Party never actually payed even the slightest bit of notice to Clause IV when we had been in Government in the past). The idea that he changed Labour in any meaningful way is a piece of propaganda spread around by both his supporters and certain elements on the left; both of which were happy to ignore the inconvenient fact that the sort of policies we were running on in the '80's were the abberation not The Way Things Had Always Been... there never was such a thing as "Old Labour" and the good/bad old days in which this mythical beast inhabited never existed either.

"New Labour" wasn't a lot more than carefully constructed media hype, a marketing ploy really (and one that was very successful in it's day)... even at it's height (we're talking late '90's here) the actual policies of the Government were exactly the sort of ones that you would expect from a Labour government (introduction of the minimum wage, some genuine attempts at constitutional change, the beginning of a massive expansion of the Welfare State, more rights for minorities...) most of which had very little to do with Blair (who has never really had as much influence over policies as everyone likes to think).
In fact the post-1997 Government has been the most re-distributive since Clem Attlee; it's just been done in a way that is so low-key that the only people that have noticed have been those who have benefited (an observation that the late Robin Cook made shortly after the 2005 Election).

The Labour Party is, and has always been, a very diverse thing, and it's policies and the way it views Government and what Government should be used for has always been changing; the classic example is the fact that until the First World War the Party was almost always opposed to using Whitehall as an instrument of policy.
All attempts to force all the different factions of the Party to share the same views have, ulitmately, failed, as have all attempts to remodel the Party around a passing ideological fad.

*applause*

[Bono]

This election is anything but upcoming.

[Bono]

Great result for the PvdV. Awsome.

[Bono]

Would a CDA-VVD-PVV-CU-SGP coalition work?